MIT Lecture Series Committee

unrated
80 minutes

view trailer

format: miniDV

Dust & Illusions: A history of Burning Man (2009)

The screening of Dust & Illusions will be followed by a Q&A with director Olivier Bonin.

Tickets are $4 for MIT students. Reserved (center) tickets are $20, general admission at the door is $15, and a limited number of discounted tickets are also available. Check dustandillusions.com for more information and for online purchasing.

Dust & Illusions looks at 30 years of history of Burning Man all the way back to the late 1970s, deep into the origins of the event. Through 21 interviewees the film presents the philosophies that fueled the creation of the festival, and its evolution from a small gathering of friends to the largest “counter-cultural” event in North America. It offers a new perspective of the meaning of the event, and questions whether its organizers are more concerned about making sure the show is ready when the gate opens or they still truly engage in building a community and fostering art. [dustandillusions.com]

Born in France and educated with an engineering degree in microelectronics, Olivier Bonin showed an early interest in photography and film. He studied photography in San Francisco, where he found his way into filmmaking. Starting with short fictions, he quickly found a perfect symbiosis between his interest and knowledge in social movements and filmmaking in the documentary form. With his attendance to the Burning Man festival, he knew he had found a great subject combining film photography in such a beautiful environment and a complicated human story of community building.

Bonin chronicles the event’s evolution, from its birthplace on a San Francisco beach to now, and he talks to many of the characters involved in its inception. While many people have heard the stories about how it started with 20 people and has grown to a full-fledged city of 50,000, some may not know its true roots in two oddball societies in San Francisco hell-bent on challenging people’s ideas of normalcy.
      -- Meredith J. Cooper, newsreview.com. Read this review.