"What You Gonna Do When the World's on Fire?" _ The Italian-born filmmaker Roberto Minervini makes movies about the lives of rural, working-class Americans ("Stop the Pounding Heart," "The Other Side") that blur the lines between documentary and art film. In the extraordinary, galvanizing "What You Gonna Do When the World's on Fire?" Minervini turns a sharp and unfailingly sympathetic eye on a black community in Louisiana, where his battered, resilient subjects include a bar owner, a pair of young brothers and a member of the New Black Panther Party for Self-Defense.
Shot in gorgeous black-and-white with a camera that sometimes seems to fade into invisibility, the movie conjures a poetic stillness amid the tumult of lives scarred and shattered by violence and injustice. At times you might wish that its loose, fragmentary structure coalesced into an angrier piece of cinematic activism, but whatever "What You Gonna Do" may lack in directness, it makes up for in a more impressionistic, spiritually infused kind of portraiture. Minervini sees his subjects as whole individuals, rather than as means to a rhetorical or even political end.
