Roberto Minervini in Los Angeles

Set in the winter of 1862, The Damned hunkers down with a troop of Union soldiers sent out west to patrol uncharted territories. Nonprofessional actors play uniformed men who “ride horses and speak of the wickedness of slavery, but their accents and affectations are anachronistically contemporary,” noted Film Comment’s Devika Girish in the introduction to her interview with Minervini. “The result is somewhere between a restaging of a moment in America’s past and a document of present-day Americans reflecting on the process of nation-making. Amid the banalities of military activity—keeping watch, making plans, cleaning rifles—the men chat about what might prompt a man to put his life on the line for an ideal: ethics, religion, family, glory, plain old bloodthirst.”

After Friday night’s screening at 2220 Arts + Archives, filmmaker Carson Lund (Eephus) will moderate a Q&A with Minervini, who grew up in Italy and lived for a few years in Spain before moving to the U.S., where he has been living for the past twenty-five years. After completing his master’s degree at the New School in New York, he made a good handful of short films before directing his first feature, The Passage (2011).

At Brain Dead Studios on Saturday, Acropolis will host the world premiere of a new restoration of this first film in what became Minervini’s Texas Trilogy—followed by a Q&A with Variety’s Peter Debruge. The Passage is an understated road movie tracking the journey of a terminally ill middle-aged woman (Soledad St. Hilaire), an ex-con (Mean Gene Kelton), and a British artist (Alan Lyddiard) as they drive out to Marfa to see a faith healer. “What might have been a sentimental medley of clichés emerges as a graceful character study, with Minervini revealing a keen ear for regional expression and a generosity of spirit comparable to Sayles and Linklater,” write Acropolis programmers Jordan Cronk and Elenie Chung.

Sunday sees a tenth-anniversary screening of The Other Side, a deeply unsettling nonfiction portrait of an Obama-hating ex-con trying to pull his life back together while the armed right-wingers in his community rehearse for the ultimate insurrection. In the immediate wake of the first election of Donald Trump, this was the film many blue-state cinephiles were telling each other they had to see in order to begin to grasp what had just happened.

In December 2016, Minervini himself wrote in Cinema Scope that he was surprised that Trump hadn’t won “by a larger margin than he actually did.” Minervini had spent a few years embedded with “the Southern militia” and warned that “the surge of these movements is no fluke, nor is it a passing trend. In fact, their key principles—xenophobia, homophobia, misogyny, an undying pride in family values and heroism, and the fear of a strong central government—are deeply engraved in the collective unconscious of conservative America.”

During the Q&A following Sunday’s screening, Screen’s Tim Grierson will have the opportunity to ask Minervini about how his views of America’s great divide have (or have not) evolved over the past decade. Throughout the retrospective, the seventh edition of the ongoing publication series Textur will be available. The volume edited by Eva Sangiorgi and James Lattimer features a conversation between Minervini and filmmaker Michelangelo Frammartino as well as essays on Minervini’s work from former Cinema Scope editor Mark Peranson, filmmaker Payal Kapadia, and curator Rachael Rakes.

Notebook is running an excerpt in which Jessica Sarah Rinland writes about Low Tide (2012), Minervini’s second feature in which a twelve-year-old (Daniel Blanchard) wanders a small Texas town, running errands and caring for his addict mother (Melissa McKinney). Low Tide will screen on June 21 with Stop the Pounding Heart (2013).

“Though you can glimpse the contours of a coming-of-age story—in which Sara, the home-schooled teenage daughter of a Christian goat-farming family, experiences vague stirrings of romance in her encounters with a young rodeo rider—the film is less concerned with narrative than with exploring the details of everyday life in a rural part of Red State America,” wrote A. O. Scott in the New York Times when Stop the Pounding Heart screened as part of New Directors/New Films. “Minervini’s method is a remarkable blend of curiosity and sensitivity, and his intimate outsider’s perspective gives the film both dreamlike intensity and documentary immediacy.”

The series wraps on June 23 with What You Gonna Do When the World’s On Fire? (2018). “Shot between Mississippi and Louisiana,” wrote Lawrence Garcia at the top his interview with Minervini for Filmmaker, “the film weaves together three parallel threads: a pair of young brothers, Ronaldo King and Titus Turner, whose fierce bond is evident from the jump; a musician/singer/bar owner named Judy Hill, who conducts community meetings aimed at consciousness-raising; and members of the New Black Panther Party, seen agitating against the killing of Alton Sterling. Interspersed throughout the film, shot in black-and-white (a first for Minervini), are sequences with the region’s Mardi Gras Indians, detailing their art and tradition. As in his previous feature, The Other Side, the film’s contemporary resonance is impossible to miss. It’s an impassioned act of portraiture that courses through with rage, fear, despair, and a measure of hope.”