80 | Sight&Sound | November 2019
REVIEWS
Reviewed by Sukhdev Sandhu
Italian-born, America-based Roberto Minervini’s
documentary fifth feature opens with two
contrasting scenes. The first, taking place one
evening in New Orleans, involves a group of
black Americans dressed up in what seems to be
Native American costume: they carry ceremonial
swords, holler and roar, and act as if they own
the streets and gas stations across which they
fancy-step. Is this a special occasion? A pageant
of some sort? There are hints of Mardi Gras,
of carnival. Carnival brings with it a cluster of
conceits: of the world – for a brief moment –
being turned upside down; of resistance through
rhythm; of slaves sloughing off their servitude.
This is followed by images of two black kids –
one maybe a teenager, the other younger – inside
what appears to be a haunted house. The lights
are dim and flicker menacingly. Distant voices
and corrugated rumbles are heard. The walls are a
mess of images – bubbles, target signs, ambiguous
as cave drawings. The boys’ faces are anxious.
The younger one whimpers and groans. “I don’t
want to do this,” he cries. They tread falteringly,
their forward motion halted by the appearance
of laser trip wires. This is a fun house that’s not
fun, an unpleasuredome, carnival turned gothic.
Here then: the American South. A place both
mythical and real, dusty and overdetermined
- yet also alive, raw, combustible. It’s part of
America and, for some, it’s deep deepest America.
Fundamental America, perhaps fundamentalist
America. But for some it also stands outside
America – impervious and resistant to what’s
going on in the rest of the country. Contemporary
figures are referred to in World’s on Fire – among
them Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin, two
of the better-known black Americans killed
by the police in recent years – but, for the most
part, Minervini’s film could have been made
at almost any point in the past few decades.
Stasis is never far from the thoughts of Judy
Hill, the film’s heartbeat. She could be in her late
thirties or her early fifties, and has a past that
seems to have involved drugs. Her hair is dyed
blonde and she wears big hooped earrings. She
runs a struggling bar that serves as a community
centre as much as a drinking den. “We was fuckin’
doomed a long time ago as black people,” she
declares to her customers. “I’m talkin’ about from
years ago when my grandmother was a young girl.
As black people we’ve been pushed out a long time
ago.” Her thoughts are as dark as the prospects of
the men and women around her; she calls them,
“the people I love, want to help, embrace”. She
is a confessor figure, a righteous preacher, the
mother some of them never had. She looks great
in a spangly outfit dancing to old-school R&B.
Another film would have focused solely on
her. World’s on Fire also looks at life, or lifelessness,
through the eyes of those two boys in the
funhouse – Ronaldo and his younger brother
Titus. Their dad’s in jail and they themselves are
constantly chided by their mother to be careful
when out on the streets. She knows, like they
know, or soon will know, that young black men in
America are both feared and disposable. Ronaldo
encourages Titus to box, urging him to throw
punches as, wearing a stars-and-stripes T-shirt,
he ducks and weaves. They mooch around by a
lake and by rail tracks. One cries out, “We should
jump on a train and go all the way to Florida!”
He makes Florida sounds like Shangri-La.
The pair’s drifting, how they notice dragonflies,
their fragility and growing wisdom: this is where
the film breathes and reveals most, where it
evokes, however fleetingly, the likes of David
Gordon Green’s George Washington (2000) and,
before that, Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (1978).
Less successful are those extended sequences
tailing the activist group the New Black Panthers
as they protest against police violence. Their
rhetoric is passionate: “We have waited on these
crackers hand and feet for 400 years and we still
got taxation without representation, 100 years of
Jim Crow, the back of the bus. You can’t eat only
white pie.” But how big is the membership? How
did the group emerge? If these kinds of questions
are too journalistic to interest Minervini, he
might instead have chosen to delve deeper
into members’ interior lives, to go beyond the
spectacle of clenched fists and rigid chest-puffing.
World’s on Fire never manages to bring the
different elements of the narrative together. It’s
neither truly immersive nor is it able to establish
a critical distance from its subjects, whose
speeches and interactions often feel stagey and
choreographed. Diego Romero Suarez-Llanos’s
high-contrast black-and-white photography
is initially striking, hinting at a kind of holy
minimalism, but its impact soon ebbs and,
combined with finicky framing and lingering
shots of fingers and feathers, is reminiscent of
fussily art-directed record sleeves or art calendars.
Minervini wants to do the right thing. To make
a film about the South that doesn’t patronise it
or treat it as a toxic terrain from which anyone
right-minded should recoil. To confront head-on
the dark and seemingly implacable forces that
make the neighbourhoods in which many black
Americans live seem more rather than less like
penal colonies. To register and even revere those
struggles in a visual language abounding in
filigree and chiaroscuro and grace notes. It’s an
enormous undertaking. He’s not there quite yet.
A documentary tracking three parallel struggles in
Louisiana and Mississippi in the American South:
that of neighbourhood linchpin Judy Hill, who wants
her struggling bar to stay open; Ashlei King, a mother
who is trying to keep her two sons Ronaldo and Titus
out of harm’s reach; and the New Black Panther
Party for Self Defense, which is campaigning against
police violence. Meanwhile, Mardi Gras Indians are
preparing their costumes in readiness for carnival.
What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire?
Italy/USA/France 2018
Director: Roberto Minervini
Produced by
Paolo Benzi
Denise Ping Lee
Roberto Minervini
Creative Producer
Dario Zonta
Written by
Roberto Minervini
Director of
Photography
Diego Romero
Suárez-Llanos
Editor
Marie-Hélène Dozo
Sound Mixer
Bernat Fortiana
Chico
©Okta Film, Pulpa
Film, Shellac Sud
Production
Companies
Pulpa Film,
Okta Film, Rai
Cinema present
in co-production
with Shellac Sud
In association with
MYmovies.it
With the support of
ARRI International
Support Program,
Fondo Audiovisivo
FVG (Friuli Venezia
Giulia), Italy/France
Co-production
Development
Fund - CNC, MiBAC
With the
participation of
Aide aux Cinémas
du Monde
A film by Roberto
Minervini
An Okta Film, Pulpa
Film production
With Rai Cinema
Cast
Judy Hill
woman
Dorothy Hill
woman’s mother
Michael Nelson
woman’s cousin
Ronaldo King
older brother
Titus Turner
younger brother
Ashlei King
boys’ mother
Kevin Goodman
Indian chief
In Black & White
[1.85:1]
Distributor
ICA CINEMA
Distribution
Italian theatrical title
Che fare quando
il mondo è in
fiamme?
Mississippi goddamn: Titus and Ronaldo King
Credits and Synopsis
A RT
PRODUCTION
CLIENT
SUBS
REPRO OP
VERSION
Reviews, 10
