In Theatres & On VOD: SPARK: A BURNING MAN STORY

Coming to theatres in NY & LA tomorrow, Friday, August 16 and to VOD starting this Saturday, August 17: SPARK: A BURNING MAN STORY

Steve Brown and Jessie Deeter’s look at the preparations behind the massive annual desert gathering bowed at SXSW earlier this year. It went on to screen at Seattle, Ashland, and SF Doc. In addition to its theatrical release, FilmBuff is releasing the doc on various platforms.

Brown and Deeter focus on two distinct sets of characters to provide viewers with a vicarious experience of the countercultural event that’s taken place in one form or another since 1986 – Burning Man’s various organizers and founders, and three attendees planning art projects or events for their time in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert. The former group provides a mix of history, philosophy, and welcome logistical insight into what it takes to provide a safe environment for 50,000 revelers who are tasked with building up and then removing an entire alternative city in the space of one week, while the latter subjects are meant to demonstrate the event’s fundamental principle of participation vs voyeurism. Surprisingly, even though some of the operational details are perhaps focused on overmuch (the film captures a particularly challenging year when a lottery system for coveted tickets led to much resentment among regular attendees), the founders remain far more engaging than the three attendees, whose activities – shopping for crazy thrift store outfits! experiencing transcendental bliss! – have been featured in far too many other attempts to capture the puzzling appeal of Burning Man for the uninitiated. While Brown and Deeter’s well-lensed film does convey the sense of community the founders want the event to impart, where it gets let down is in overemphasizing how much this supposedly matters in some deeper way, when, ultimately, it seems clear that, for most attendees, it’s primarily a big, crazy, hedonistic party. There’s nothing wrong with that, or with admitting it, rather than trying to couch it in some grander – and unconvincing – ideology about how life-changing it supposedly is for the revelers.