Hatred in the neighborhood During the time that the mocumentary genre has won big and small screens, and sometimes even the hearts of the viewer, we have witnessed many different events, from the supernatural to the mundane, like coffee in the morning. We have seen all kinds of demonic comings, ghostly tyranny and dozens of exorcism scenes. We followed a bunch of teenagers who threw parties, celebrated adulthood, had sex, prepared to kill classmates or recklessly walked straight into the clutches of death. We even spent a few days with LAPD officers who came to a moment that changed their lives forever. But what even the most sophisticated viewer has not yet observed is the existence of dysfunctional black areas in the United States, where drug trafficking and all the crimes that follow from it flourish. Curtis Snow, a self-made Atlanta burglar and drug dealer, decided to correct this unfortunate omission by sharing parts of his life captured on video with director Damon Russell. Their joint film Snow on Tha Bluff is not positioned as a documentary and some details were added not without the participation of the imagination of the two, but even this was enough that after the release of the film, the Atlanta police asked the authors to find out whether they had anything to do with the real robberies that occurred in this city. It is not known exactly what they found out, but very soon Snow went to prison, and it is not difficult to guess what article he was convicted of. Even while behind bars, he zealously guarded the film’s secrets, revealing very little about what actually happened and what was staged, but that doesn’t really matter, because Snow on Tha Bluff is all real when it comes to how well it depicts dysfunctional black neighborhoods.
For a modest timekeeping of eighty minutes, the film managed to cover all the problems of the ghetto, ranging from constant deaths and ending with constant jail time, as well as the fact that both have become quite commonplace. But the authors did not just poke the viewer into the facts, they showed the attitude of people really affected by such events. Most films about niggers from poor areas are launched into a stunningly unrealistic sentimentality, presenting a portrait in which everyone feels sorry for everyone - the director feels sorry for the heroes, the viewer feels sorry for the heroes, the heroes feel sorry for themselves. The truth of life is that the endless number of corpses that have been on these streets is not a cause for pity for the local criminals and other residents of the area, on the contrary – the more they have been in the number of alterations, the more people they have robbed, the more family members they lost to a stray bullet, the more they plunge into the underworld, and not because of grief, but because of the pride that overwhelms them, because of the knowledge that they have survived just as much shit as a decent nigger from the ghetto should survive. This is not to say that there is no pain, there is no grief and despair, but more often than not, the day someone dies is "an ordinary day in the area, a nigga just got shot, nothing special." Damon Russell, with the help of the experienced Snow in this world, creates the first in the time of “The Corner” and “The Wire” by David Simon an adequate, realistic and devoid of sentimentality portrait of the life of the black American ghetto. By the way, one of the actors of the legendary series, mentioned earlier, became a producer of Snow on Tha Bluff, and he also understands something in the sanctified theme of the film.
The film culminates in the death of the mother of one wonderful child, and it’s not even about how this little one stunningly realistically expresses fear, confusion and grief, it may be exactly what he experienced, since one of the few known facts about Snow’s life is that his son’s mother was murdered in 2005. It's about how an hapless father tries to calm a heartbroken child. While prosperous white parents, when one of them dies, try to alleviate the grief for young children in every possible way - invent veiled formulations of where the mother went, and sometimes even lie to delay the moment of recognition; at the same time, in a black ghetto, a local robber and drug dealer will cut the truth uterus and tell his son, who still can’t walk, that he is not small, and must stop whining and behave like a man. In this episode lies the difference between a white office worker and a black criminal who never knew, and probably doesn’t want, another life. And they have a different attitude not only to death, but also to life, which Curtis Snow perfectly illustrates in the sensational film, which was able to accommodate the ability of the guys from the ghetto to express all emotions with just a couple of obscene words, the confusion of local quarrels and the philosophy of niggers, for whom prison is a native habitat, a place where you can relax, freely live and eat, and then with renewed strength return to earn money on the streets.