Often makers of feature films using a documentary’s tools - hand-held cameras, jumpy cuts, ambient lighting, fragmented narrative - say they do so to approximate reality. No one seems to have a steady job, and there’s no shaking the sense of wasted souls in a forsaken sector of society. This riveting account of thug life - the unglamorous, impoverished variety - is punctuated by constant profanity and undecipherable slang, occasional violence, steady drinking and weed or crack smoking. “They say drugs kill you,” he says to the camera, before disagreeing: “They help you out.

We also learn about Snow’s business: selling drugs that are largely supplied, it seems, by ripping off other dealers at gunpoint during late-night raids. So we tour the Bluff while he introduces his crew, his baby mama and two toddlers, his grandmother, the street corner where his brother was fatally shot. The dealer, Curtis Snow, steals one other thing too: the idea of filming everything he does. A dealer approaches the car, smoothly talks his way in, directs them to a secluded street, then, pulling out a handgun, robs them of their money and - why not? - the camera. From the start of “Snow on tha Bluff,” which runs without any introductory credits, this jolt of a film drops into a you-are-there crime scene: Three college students - one manning a video camera - drive into the Bluff, a run-down neighborhood in West Atlanta (actually, run-down is being kind), looking to buy drugs.

Snow on tha bluff full movie