So we’d follow them and just start filming whatever was going on in the neighborhood.
We’d be standing around and an ambulance would pass by. I was just filming whatever was around that would happen. There wasn’t any real direction at first. Once that trust was there, then we started bringing out the camera. I got to know all of them before I even shot a frame with. I met with him, would hang out down there, and I’d meet his friends. Russell: It was a very practical process. I imagine you’re staging a lot of things that had happened in his actual life? And he stumbled upon me through some people we had met while we were making this little film.įilmmaker: What was it like working for him? You’re shooting in these incredibly depressed neighborhoods.
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He had all this footage and was looking for anyone connected to the film or TV world to help him. Russell: I had shot a little short film down there. Snow on Tha Bluff opens at the reRun GastroPub Theater in Dumbo, Brooklyn on Friday.įilmmaker: How did you come across this project? Curtis Snow sought you out, correct? Had he already been shooting stuff beforehand? Regardless, and no matter how small its release, it is a major film black American cinema finally has its David Holzman’s Diary. Where does the documentary end and the fiction begin? Or, vice versa? Russell, an Atlanta native and Georgia State alumni making his feature debut here, certainly isn’t telling. Snow on Tha Bluff forces us to understand Snow as a man trapped in a brutal system of recrimination and victimhood. And while the film is an editorial marvel, seamlessly interweaving Snow’s own archival footage with material directed by Russell, it is no mere stunt.
#Snow on tha bluff dvd movie
It opens with Snow stealing a camcorder from a trio of unsuspecting tourists slumming for drugs after a stop at Stone Mountain the rest of this “found footage” movie is ostensibly shot on that camera. At first glance - and perhaps after many more - it’s nearly impossible to know how much of the film is staged or not. Light on narrative and heavy on incident, Snow on Tha Bluff, which had its world premiere at last year’s Slamdance Film Festival before making stops in Maryland, Brooklyn and Atlanta (the latter for a particularly memorable, short-circuited screening), is as exhilarating, comical and infuriating as its anti-hero proves to be clever, resourceful, violent and, finally, irresponsible. Indeed, its characters frequently speak a Southern Negro dialect that few but the initiated may be able to understand. Easy to dismiss as “ Cops from the perp’s perspective,” perhaps, this startlingly authentic document of the life of a young, black, crack-dealing single parent - and of the dangers that lurk in poor and working-class black communities - isn’t easy to digest. An incredible combination of found footage, no-budget narrative ingenuity and pulled-from-the-streets doc immediacy, it discovers in its incredibly charismatic and troubled protagonist, Curtis Snow, an American life many of us would probably rather forget about.
The line separating documentary and narrative film aesthetics has never been more porous than it is now, but Damon Russell’s revelatory Snow on tha Bluff lives comfortably on that line. In Director Interviews, Directors, InterviewsĬurtis Snow, Damon Russell, Slamdance, Snow on tha Bluff
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