Ronaldo, left, and Titus in What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire? (KimStim)

With the black-and-white What You Gonna Do When The World’s on Fire?, director Roberto Minervini takes an intimate look at the stressful #BlackLivesMatter summer of 2017 on four sets of African Americans between Baton Rouge, Louisiana and Jackson, Mississippi. The close trust between director and residents gives viewers an unusually revealing experience.

His previous Southern tours allowed disaffected, marginalized white folks to act out versions of their difficult personal lives on camera in his Texas trilogy—The Passage (2011), Low Tide (2012), Stop the Pounding Heart (2013)—and in Louisiana’s The Other World (2015). Those films now look like predictive portraits of Trump voters, while his latest film illustrates the vise of structural racism in a more straightforward, documentary style.

Throughout the summer, Big Chief Kevin Goodman of the Flaming Arrows Mardi Gras Indians works steadily on his intricate costume of feathers and beads. A real-life counterpart of Clarke Peters’s character in David Simon’s Treme series, he is an important symbol of tradition, community, and family continuity. (And an important reminder that the elaborately-costumed drummers and chanters are not intended as tourist attractions.)

Judy Hill runs the Ooh Poo Pah Doo Bar, named for the R & B classic song, to fulfill her dream of making a neighborhood gathering place for local jazz and blues musicians, including one night a week when she sings with the house band. Now in her 50s, she struggles every month to meet the rent while her landlord sees gentrification coming. Over the three years Minervini spent with her, she tearfully notes her past issues with addiction and abuse and the additional pressures now on her from her stalwart mother’s failing health. She still takes time out to help a cousin connect with his family roots.

Minervini’s kids were friends with brothers Ronaldo, 14, and Titus, nine, who live with their young single mother, Ashleigh King. But summer in Mississippi, with the constant news of more police shootings, is not just about horsing around outside for the African American boys but full of warnings and fear; the older brother touchingly tries to initiate the younger in the incomprehensible social climate by trying to explain the difference between race and color. The tension seems to have gotten to Ronaldo when his mother discovers he is not putting the effort in at school. She earnestly wants him to understand that school is his ticket out, but he’s already discouraged.

His attitude would confirm for Krystal Muhammad, the charismatic chair of the Southern chapter of the New Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, what is happening to black youth. She rails that the “colonial” school system still excludes the African American view of history, particularly the unending impact of slavery, and provides political commentary throughout.

The activists offer meals to the homeless and also protest the Baton Rouge police killing of Alton Sterling on July 5, 2016, and two horrible, unsolved murders of black men in Mississippi in 2017, Jeremy Jerome Jackson and Phillip Carroll. Both deaths Muhammad calls evidence of the return of lynching. The growing frustration and anger as the protesters lead call and response chants of “Black power! No justice, no peace!” culminates in a confrontation with that city’s police.

These everyday heroes’ day-to-day efforts to find hope and optimism against enormous odds are portrayed as discouraging yet stubbornly optimistic.