Snow on da Bluff is raw, it’s ghetto, it’s full of guns and coke and ass, and at the same time provides a look in on some people who only really want a taste of something bigger, a place that’s wholly theirs.
At a local film fest in Atlanta, viewers shouted at the screening, nearly breaking out into a brawl. Truly, for a film as uniquely considered as Snow on da Bluff, and as fearless in its willingness to show real elements of the side of a world most people could never set foot in will undoubtedly cause a wide range of reactions. “Nowhere to go but up,” he told us, slung back on the sofa, smoking. “I got real dope, watch this.” He went into the back room and came back with a bag of Benadryl and other OTC tabs and threw it on the table laughing, then sat down to roll a blunt.Īs the afternoon wrapped up, Curtis talked to Michael about his hopes for Snow on da Bluff to do well, though his attitude toward the progression seemed realistic, ready for anything. “People don’t even know what they have,” Curtis told us. A girl showed up hoping to sell some Xanax, eight for $10, though when she showed Curtis her pills he told her it was Roxicodone and she looked sad and left. We chilled in the dark and shot the shit. Framed paintings of a bed and an angel and an original painting of what I could only think of as Monet’s Waterlillies on lean covered the otherwise light yellow walls. Two cold McDonald’s burgers sat on the coffee table in their wrappers. A kid’s show about a rabbit played to no one.
The trek ended back in Curtis’s apartment, a small, dark living room with two deep-seated sofas around a big screen TV whose screen had been damaged, making the picture look muffled under yellow oil. I asked one of the younger guys in Curtis’s crew if he had hopes to ever leave the Bluff, and he kind of grinned and said he wasn’t sure, but that the one way out he knew of was “to use my knowledge, just like Tupac.” Damon Russell, the film’s director, told me later that every local dope boy gets buried by the same funeral home. The owner came out from behind the glass to tell Curtis he was not welcome, proceeded as he is his by his own rep. With no local grocery, the only nearby place to buy food or anything else was a corner store or a liquor store, where while visiting the latter to buy water after hours spent in the sun a fight almost broke out. Truly, life in the Bluff seemed like urban wilderness, a kind of wild west set in destroyed suburbs. “Beggars ain’t beggin’,” Curtis told Michael. More stories of recent violence, including one about a 15-year-old who was recently killed trying to barricade his home’s door against robbers, reinforced that. I had to remind myself at several times how if I were here alone and beyond cameras it would be a wholly different story, particularly at night.
One of Curtis’s crew grabbed a handful of free condoms with a smile and said to himself, “I use these in five minutes.” Michael seemed particularly moved by the presence of this establishment, and recorded an impromptu plea to Obama to make this a nationwide program. We visited a random safe house pretty much in the middle of nowhere, independently run by a kind old woman who regularly gave away free HIV and hep-C testing, as well as free food and clothes and syringes for anyone who came in. For a place as notoriously dangerous as this one, people’s general tone was positive, and good hearted. “The trick is not being able to leave the ghetto,” he told us, “the trick is coming back.”ĭespite the surrounding damage, everyone seemed in good spirits.
As we came along down streets lined with houses that looked like they’d come through a hurricane, boarded over and abandoned, torn to shit or half burnt down, Michael sat at the window looking out and thinking aloud about the strange shift in terrain. Most seemed to want their neighborhood kept to itself. I remember realizing we were getting near the Bluff when passing a group of men standing on the street shouted, “No pictures!” Most of the people we ran into throughout the afternoon not involved with the film made a point of this: Fuck cameras, and fuck you for aiming one at me. Atlanta is interesting in that cultural and economic divisions can often change from block to block, with hardly any bleed-over between expensive loft apartments and projects. It was hot and there were eight of us packed into a large black SUV, though we didn’t have to drive too long from the expensive midtown hotel where Michael was staying to the hood.