‘It’s a Spiritual Experience’: The docuseries centers on the incredible mayhem of Burning Man | documentary

IIn 1986, a group of starving artists seeking release amid a devastating economic recession built an oversized wooden sculpture, transported it to a San Francisco beach and set it on fire while police officers and passersby looked on in disbelief. Forty years later, Burning Man is the festival to end all festivals—a sprawling spectacle of music, art, and self-expression that draws tens of thousands to the Nevada desert each summer for community, catharsis, and spiritual connection. It’s a pilgrimage for bohemians and billionaires, a word synonymous with a certain strain of hipsterism, a countercultural establishment grappling with the contradictions between its liberal ideals, corporate reality, and the regular presence of such luminaries as Grover Norquist, the conservative strategist and brother of Elon Musk.

It seems the only way to truly understand the meaning of the place is to take the trip – metaphorically at first, then literally once you’re fully immersed in Black Rock City’s psychedelic culture, anything goes. “It’s an immersive experience that seems like it would be impossible to capture on film or convey what it feels like to be inside a city that exists for a week, entirely imagined, built and maintained by the people inside,” says Jehane Noujaim, co-director of The Man Will Burn, a new documentary series that premiered on HBO this month at the festival.

Noujaim, who has won widespread acclaim for her documentaries on Al Jazeera’s coverage of the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the sex cult NXIVM, didn’t set out to chronicle the world of Burning Man Steampunk. Her curiosity was piqued while trying to scan footage she shot at the festival for The Great Hack, her documentary about the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, which used a curtain-raiser scene featuring a whistleblower in a makeshift temple on site. “I spent about eight months trying to get permission to use that shot — the longest ever for a shot, which is crazy,” she says. “I didn’t know Burning Man had a CEO or board of directors.”

Once it was properly and reliably introduced, Noujaim learned of a vast film archive that the festival had been privately amassing since its early days in the hopes that an independent filmmaker could turn it into something one day. That was enough carrot to lure her in and bring in Vikram Gandhi, the filmmaker behind Pari and Kumari, as co-director. Their collaboration results in a four-part deep dive, tracing the full trajectory of Burning Man’s bizarre social experiment as the festival confronts Covid, a boardroom revolt and the effects of global warming.

Noujaim and Gandhi portray Burning Man as a love story between Larry Harvey, the protest artist who saw the festival’s future when it was still a modest gathering of Bay Area eccentrics, and Marian Goodell, his longtime partner and right-hand man who has carried that vision forward as the festival’s CEO since Harvey’s death at age 70 from stroke complications in 2018.

Viewers meet Goodell as she grapples with the decision to cancel the festival for the second year in a row due to the pandemic. Kimbal Musk, a powerful presence on the Burning Man board, sees her warning not as wise but as an opportunity to change leadership and rally a faction of disaffected board members to his cause. Meanwhile, individual festival-goers are weighing the risks of joining a splinter gathering determined to return to the desert regardless of the consequences, or staying home while Burning Man adapts to the virtual age.

For Burning Man organizers, this seemed like the worst possible time to have cameras — and on more than one occasion they told the filmmakers that there wouldn’t be much to shoot because the festival wouldn’t be happening. But Noujaim and Gandhi pushed for access anyway. “It was a really important time to dig in and try to understand what this place was about and why so many people around the world cared about it so much that they would weather the pandemic and keep going even when it was cancelled,” Gandhi says. “When we started filming Renegade Burn, we didn’t know if it was going to be a triumph or another Fyre Festival.”

Decommodification, radical inclusion, and civic responsibility are among Burning Man’s guiding principles. Since the turn of the 20th century, the festival has been held in Black Rock City, a semicircular community 100 miles from Reno that is built up and torn down without a trace every year — “swept away by the first strong winds,” venerable co-founder Harvey says in the doc. But it seems it’s the spiritual influence the festival has on ancient pilgrims that can make devotion seem like an illusion to outsiders — so much so that a mention of Burning Man in a dating profile is an instant red flag.

“My first film was about impersonating a religious leader and starting a fictional religion,” says Gandhi, referring to Kumari. “The whole thought process I went through while making the film was about creating a story, a creation myth, some kind of sacred space, not necessarily commandments but teachings — all very similar to what Harvey designed for Burning Man. But the main difference is that people create their own religious system. It has all the things that our religions have — place, self-reference, ritual — but in reality there is no doctrine.”

There’s a lot to admire about Burning Man’s big tent: the pacifists who reach out to the nuts of guns. Google co-founder Sergey Brin takes the rush-hour shift at the food court. Norquist, one of the architects of the trickle-down economy, extols the virtues of Black Rock City’s cashless barter system. “The first day I was filming, I was sitting around a fire next to a platoon leader who I interviewed for my film, Control Room, about the island,” Noujaim says. However, a society built on allowing everyone to find their own truth inevitably leaves room for blind spots.

For all of Burning Man’s humanitarian virtues, it has long struggled to escape the perception — and reality — that it caters primarily to white people with the time and means to take a week off on Labor Day to reconnect with their inner child on the playa. The film is careful to push against this perception, following a black former paratrooper on a Burning Man pilgrimage to address the PTSD he suffers on the battlefield. Yet all the talk of community, gifting, and radical inclusion rarely survives the trip home, washed off in the first hot shower. The experience at Playa has become more stratified—tourists carry items into vertical tents while A-listers and influencers drop by the tens of thousands into air-conditioned RVs with all the trappings of a luxury spa experience.

Even the nonprofit behind Burning Man is starting to look like a cash grab for festival-goers who see its $60 million operating budget and sprawling real estate portfolio and wonder how high ticket prices will be. this economy. In the end, Black Rock City seems like just another victim of gentrification, a magic sandbox for cosplayers to act out socialist fantasies that would never fly in their neighborhoods. “It’s as if Burning Man has become expensive because… world “It’s expensive,” Gandhi says. But actually maybe a ticket would be cheaper than Coachella – which is now around $600? But I agree that it has changed and money is a much bigger part of it.

The Man Will Burn would have highlighted the more scandalous aspects of the festival to attract viewers who now expected documentaries only Entertainment: power struggles, gratuitous nudity, drug use, pilgrims who died in the desert; Heavy rains turned the playa into a muddy quagmire and prompted news viewers to call for a National Guard rescue. Instead, Noujaim and Gandhi offer a comprehensive, balanced vision of the life and times of the festival — one that will inspire FOMO in some and leave others feeling like they’ve experienced enough Burning Man without ever having to go at all.

The long, exotic trip may be worth taking in either direction. “One of the things that’s so amazing is that you’ve never seen so many resources dedicated to something only “It exists for a week and then burns up,” Gandhi says. “It’s a spiritual experience that you can look at in two ways: You can see it as rich people burning money. Or you can see it as a rare ritual that exists in the world that maybe you’re not a part of. But we don’t really have things like that. This is just an occurrence of the event, because sense“.