The Burn

Director Søren Martinsen explores the spectacle and destruction of the annual Burning Man Festival held in the Nevada desert. For one week a year, thousands of people travel to Black Rock Desert, creating a temporary community in the scorching heat, cold nights, blinding dust and thunderstorms. The culmination is the burning of an enormous effigy of a man and a cathartic torching of all the structures, artworks, etc., that have been built. Afterwards, everybody leaves as they came, ostensibly to return to their normal lives.