The Other Side Trailer (2015)

Trailer for the documentary The Other Side, which screened at PSIFF.

Brace yourself: Italian filmmaker Roberto Minervini will not flinch. You get more than a hint of what’s coming in the film’s opening scene, when a man wakes up in the bushes stark naked. This is Mark, and we’ll be seeing a lot more of him: shooting up, screwing, dealing, breaking into a school and shooting up some more. For all that, Mark’s a likeable guy, mostly. Which is more than can be said for the militia that pops up later, avowed libertarians training for the forthcoming revolution.

Uninterested in (or oblivious to) documentary ethics or the supposed demands of narrative fiction, Minervini is carving out his own truth here. It’s an unpalatable one, to be sure, alternately pathetic and alarming, but you won’t doubt its authenticity, or its validity. This is the other side of the American Dream: the human detritus, angry, abandoned, high as a kite.