"Burning Man: Beyond Black Rock" encourages audiences to take a look beyond the stereotypes you might know about the Burning Man Festival, grasping the social structures, the art and the messages that go along with the meeting of about 35,000 in the Nevada desert.
Through a lot of footage from the camp, the documentary manages to catch quite an intimate image of the feeling, that leads many people to leave behind their usual lives and enjoy the freedom of Burning Man. Through interviews with the organizers as well as some volunteers, you also get a picture of the dimension, the infrastructure of the event has taken lately. I think that this is a good film to understand some of the spirit that is connected to the gathering. Personally, I would have also loved to hear some critical voices, maybe from people who live there and dislike the festival or from guests that didn't like their time, not because I want to set Burning Man in bad light, but because it would have helped to also understand how some people might have no place in such a new social order. Of course the movie cannot include more recent phenomenons such as commercialization or the splitting into different groups with kind of an elite-thinking.
All in all I really enjoyed to learn more about a festival that is most often just briefly touched by the mass media. For everyone that wants to dive into the atmosphere of the Black Rock Desert, this is a documentary worth watching.
Through a lot of footage from the camp, the documentary manages to catch quite an intimate image of the feeling, that leads many people to leave behind their usual lives and enjoy the freedom of Burning Man. Through interviews with the organizers as well as some volunteers, you also get a picture of the dimension, the infrastructure of the event has taken lately. I think that this is a good film to understand some of the spirit that is connected to the gathering. Personally, I would have also loved to hear some critical voices, maybe from people who live there and dislike the festival or from guests that didn't like their time, not because I want to set Burning Man in bad light, but because it would have helped to also understand how some people might have no place in such a new social order. Of course the movie cannot include more recent phenomenons such as commercialization or the splitting into different groups with kind of an elite-thinking.
All in all I really enjoyed to learn more about a festival that is most often just briefly touched by the mass media. For everyone that wants to dive into the atmosphere of the Black Rock Desert, this is a documentary worth watching.