Roberto Minervini , for the first time in the Competition in Venice, continues to exploit the form of the docufiction to narrate deep America, investigating the darkest and most tormented corners. After The Other Side (2015), the director remains in Louisiana in search of "broken" stories in an attempt to return the word to the "last". In this case it is not a matter of "forgotten" narratives, but of conflicts That shake the news and the news of the United States in the Trump was, even if Observed from the point of view of a local community.

Summer 2017. In the Afro-American community, shocked by the brutal murder of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, three different stories intertwine: those of two grow up in a dangerous neighborhood, a bartender who wants to assert their voice.

With respect to The Other Side in this second trial of Minervini in Louisiana the fictional character appears weaker, the "plot" of the less defined filmic construction, the will to give fluidity and narrative cohesion to the resized documentary material. The director chooses a fragmentary trend based on the succession of ordinary moments of life that are mostly unrelated. The "banality" of daily oppression, injustice and the danger that permeates the routine of these lives only highlight the urgency of the denunciation. The provocative, aggressive character of the film is intended to restore the necessity of the struggle and the tension of the clashes.

The director proposes close-ups, insists on faces, words: words of indignation, of concern or only of suffering. There is no delay in digressions on the environment, on the poetic moments That marked the development of The Other Side . Express the heaviness of a condition of impotence. It is no coincidence that the Black Power chorus is a pressing that after the projection continues to "pulsate" in the head of the spectator: a "cry" that tells the impetuousness of the denunciation of a discrimination never surpassed.

The Italian director managed to immerse himself in a complex context made up of dangerous and marginalized neighborhoods. Camouflaged behind the camera, his gaze gives freedom to stories that are prayed to be narrated deepening an unsolved chronicle. Minervini allows the participants to communicate with the camera, giving them the opportunity to tell them their own and community concerns, to "represent" their anger and protest.

A docufiction can not avoid producing a discourse on the "representation" of reality. In this case it is a complaint. To the point of view of a dangerously intrusive relationship. At moments of guerrilla warfare and maximum dramaturgical tension, to stories of gruesome and desperate outbursts, the director's gaze

* PhD student in History of Performing Arts at the University of Florence
Layout by Marcello Bellia, PhD student in History of Performance at the University of Florence