Confessions of a Burning Man

Running time: N/A

Sneak Premiere One week every year, a virtual city is erected on the surface of the Black Rock Desert in Nevada: Black Rock City, population 29,000, otherwise known as Burning Man. Un Su Lee and Paul Barnett's Confessions of a Burning Man offers an original and intimate, yet widely appealing, view of the Burning Man event as seen through the eyes of four of our contemporaries. Samantha Weaver, clearly in her element, builds a labyrinth as a means to find her place and create her communal identity. Kevin Epps, hesitant at first, finds himself in a very accepting community, and he gets to appear on a local radio station. Michael Winaker, a suspended cab driver, pursues his desire to drive a cab, something he is forbidden to do anywhere else except on the playa. And Anna Getty finds herself on a personal journey where she comes to painful truths about her family and her past. The four are thrown together in the visual maelstrom that is Burning Man. Humanity, art, and dust collide in an encounter that is out of this world. Burning Man's growth and socio-economic implications are told lyrically by its founder, Larry Harvey (who will be at the screening with co-organizer Marian Goodell), whose oral history weaves like a world-scale version of what the four individuals experience as part of this temporal desert community. Whether from the individual or the collective perspective, there can be no doubt that Burning Man is one of the most important cultural phenomena to emerge from contemporary America.