Snow on tha Bluff

Damon Russell's 2012 film is set in the Atlanta neighbourhood known as the Bluff and deliberately leaves the line between reality and fiction unclear. Curtis Snow steals a camera from college students during a drug deal and starts filming his own life with a friend: robberies, running from the police, dealing, and trying to provide for his family. Curtis Snow is a real person playing under his own name, but the film is fiction. That ambiguity is both the film's power and its problem. The found-footage aesthetic produces a directness about the reality of the neighbourhood, while denying the viewer any way of knowing how much of what they are watching is real, and making the violence consumable. Presenting poverty and crime this way was argued over on release. Who it's for: viewers interested in found-footage form and independent films about American urban poverty. Who it's not for: anyone who finds the blending of reality and fiction ethically troubling, or avoiding intense violence and drug content.