When a friend tips him off to another gang selling drugs nearby, he invades their house with the help of his friend and robs them of their supply as well. He recruits his friends and robs the rivals of their drug supply. Recognizing the quality of the camera, he hands it to one of his friends, telling him to continue filming no matter what in order to capture their day-to-day life as it occurs.Ĭurtis soon learns that another group of drug dealers have encroached on his territory, selling drugs not far from his street. Once they arrive, Curtis pulls out a gun, robs them of their purses and camera, and makes a hasty escape. They find a dealer named Curtis Snow, who asks them to drive him to his house in order to fulfill their order.

One of the students holds a camera with the hope of filming the encounter. Clearly naive, they joke about flirting in hopes of getting free drugs, and reassure one another that they have nothing to fear. There’s the need way.Three college students drive to the Bluff, a westside Atlanta neighborhood, intending to buy some drugs from a dealer. A late-act tragedy undermines Snow’s bombast, and a subsequent shot of him and his son in a trashed bedroom conveys the stunted maturity of the charismatic drug dealer, who sums up his self-justifying gangster ethos by telling his girlfriend: “There ain’t no right or no wrong way.

Profane and unrepentant, Snow cuts cocaine with his son by his side while, positing criminality as a genetic trait, reminiscing about how he inherited his career from his father.

Frequently scored to hip-hop heard through car speakers, Bluff‘s portrait of street life has a grungy off-the-cuff realism that’s only compromised by some obviously staged incidents, which include the aforementioned stickups and moments in which friends make direct mention of the omnipresent camera. From jarring videotape edits to unprocessed audio, Russell’s film has a convincingly rugged home-movie quality and a narrative to match, as Snow parties and provides for his baby mama and young son by selling drugs and robbing competitors at gunpoint. Synthesizing fact and fiction, Snow on tha Bluff details the day-to-day misadventures of fast-talking dope-slinger Curtis Snow, a ne’er-do-well who opens Damon Russell’s docudrama by stealing a camcorder from college kids and proceeding to record his life in Atlanta’s notorious the Bluff neighborhood.

Snow on tha bluff full documentary