Cinesource is publishing a great article that talks about Dust & Illusions as San Francisco 8th Documentary Film Festival is approaching.

Buy Tickets online for Dust & Illusions @ SF DocFest 2009

Whoa Man, What Time is It? The ‘Man’ goes up in Olivier Bonin’s provocative, even critical, new film “Dust and Illusions,” showing at DocFest. photo: photo SFDoc Fest

With the Bay Area home to Burning Man – the hugely popular desert pilgrimage which began here in 1986 with some artists celebrating a solstice on a San Francisco beach – the ticket to ride is “Dust and Illusions,” by French-born filmmaker Olivier Bonin. With growing interest and more participants – last month, over 50,000 people come from all corners of the earth – this anarchic estrus of art, sensuality and bacchanalia must be addressed in film.

Amazingly, this is Bonin’s first film, which we found out when we sat down with him and doubly astounding that he tackled the Burn, with the inherent problems of dust, distraction and the philosophy of the spectacle.

“I was doing still photography at City and one of my teachers told me that the pictures I was making – that I was trying to tell a story rather than take a still.” Bonin learned filmmaking through friends who were already working on projects. “At that time, I was doing microelectronic engineering in the South Bay and I was making a decent salary, so I decided to just buy a Panasonic DVX-100 and see what I can do with it.”

After getting a camera, all Bonin needed was a subject. A friend who had been doing a video on the Burning Man festival contacted him after the project fell through. “I’ll just go there and film and see what happens,” reflected Bonin on his interest in the Black Rock, Nevada festival site. While he cut his documentarian teeth on the DVX-100, he began amassing interviews with Burners old and young – even scoring several interviews with founder, Larry Harvey and 20 other key figures from the event’s 30 plus-year history.

Bonin’s film supplies a historical perspective on how the Burning Man event became associated with a counter-cultural movement in America. Perhaps more importantly, the film looks critically at how the meaning of the festival has changed over 20 years, from an existential form of expressionism to a more commodified ritual of indulgence.

Some critique is necessary to make sense of this powerful cultural event. It divides “the Bay Area media and arts community… into three: those bereft because their buddies all left for Burning Man… those who wouldn’t go if you paid them, and the majority – those going to Burning Man!” according to CineSource’s “B Roll” “What Does Burning Man Mean?” And it pushes the envelope of gender relations, sculpture, gift economy and alt-spirituality.

“Dust and Illusions” is just one of 11 films by Bay area artists, and one of more than 50 films featured in the DocFest from around the world.

You can also buy your tickets for a viewing of Dust & Illusions here:
http://sfdocfest.bside.com/2009/films/dustandillusons_sfdocfest2009

http://www.straight.com/article-238628/olivier-bonin-brings-burning-man-documentary-vancouver
By Helen Halbert
Publish Date: July 8, 2009

There’s an adage among veteran Burners said so frequently that it’s become a bit of a joke: Burning Man was better last year. Again.For director Olivier Bonin, the idea might just have some truth to it. His new documentary, Dust & Illusions: A History of Burning Man, traces the history of the hippie arts festival from its origins. It also offers criticism of the event that, in recent years, has attracted as many as 50,000 people to the middle of the Nevada desert for an eight-day celebration of self-expression, community, and rejection of commodification.

The festival culminates in the ritualistic bonfire of a Wicker Man–esque effigy.

Granted, there’s a fair bit of drug use. But there are also costumes, performances, workshops, and gift exchanges. Most importantly, there are also large-scale and interactive art installations of anything and everything, from Mad Max–era art cars to steampunk walking mechanical spiders (the latter, Mondo Spider, can be seen on Commercial Drive during Car-Free Days and the Parade of Lost Souls).

Dust & Illusions: The History of Burning Man premieres tonight (July 8th) in Vancouver at the Rio Theatre (1660 E. Broadway) at 9 p.m. Tickets are $11.50 in advance or $15 at the door; Bonin will be in attendance to answer all your post-screening burning questions.

Bonin attended his first Burning Man in 2003. “I thought the following year that I’d just go there and film a little bit and edit a bit; make a little, quick film out of it,” Bonin told the Straight on the line from San Francisco. The film ended up taking him five years to complete.

Life on the playa—the dry lakebed of Nevada’s Black Rock Desert—can be a demanding environment. Dehydration and heat stroke are real threats and Burners must weather frequent dust storms.

“It’s very hard to film out there because of the conditions,” Bonin explained. “But the second reason is because you don’t really want to be filming out there; you don’t want to point your camera into whatever people are doing. I figured that out quickly in the first year and once I started to discover that there was a whole history of the event that was really interesting, I decided to approach it [the film] in a very different way.”

Bonin met with artists before the event and followed them throughout their year of producing art and preparing for Burning Man. The film mainly focuses on the Flaming Lotus Girls, a San Francisco–based artist collective who design and build sculptures from steel, copper, glass, wood, as well as LEDs, lighting, and flame throwers.

“But the film is really the story of the event from the late ’70s in San Francisco,” Bonin said.

The documentary presents the entire history of the festival, from its humble beginnings in the ’70s and the first official Burning Man in 1986 on a Californian beach to today’s incarnation: a functioning yet temporary micro-metropolis known as Black Rock City.

For many, the event is still meaningful as a way of encouraging creativity and community. But Bonin worries that the principles of Burning Man are becoming overshadowed by the increasing number of people in attendance.

“The event was created in the first place to escape from larger society and culture and to create something new, and the [film’s] criticism mainly comes from the fact that Burning Man is more and more becoming a spectacle,” Bonin explains.

While Bonin acknowledges that the event is exceptional because it provides grants and funding to artists, but, citing a $300,000 price tag for the Burning Man effigy in 2007, he still thinks the organizers could budget better in order to redirect more money into art projects.

“I don’t have a problem with people having fun, and I think Burning Man has created something very important—it inspires people to create art and do this in a noncommercial fashion and try to rediscover themselves and their society through the production of art—and I hope that the goal of the organizers is to keep focusing on this in the future and to find new ways to do this.”

http://www.theolympian.com/living/story/905542.html

Published July 09, 2009

BY MOLLY GILMORE; For The Olympian

Burning Man, the internationally known festival in which thousands of people create a temporary community in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, began as an impromptu performance art event and family picnic on a San Francisco beach.

The annual festival’s history is uncovered in the documentary “Dust and Illusions.”

“It’s the story of the rise and fall of an ideal,” said Bonin of San Francisco. “There were a few people who were kind of marginal and wanted to do something different and wanted to get outside of the mainstream. They were trying to invent a new community, something with new values, and now it’s been caught up into the commercialization of an event.”

Paris-born Bonin first encountered the festival in 2003. “I really liked the history that was behind the event,” he said. “I wanted to explore that and do something deeper than anybody had done before.”

Bonin’s film has received critical praise. “I think this is the best film about Burning Man that’s ever been made,” Steve Jones wrote in a review for the San Francisco Bay Guardian, adding that the film “revives questions about whether the rapidly growing event has missed an opportunity to transform itself from the best party on the planet into an important and enduring sociopolitical movement.”

It’s appropriate that the festival was part of what inspired Bonin to become a filmmaker.

“For a long time, I’d wanted to do something artistic, and I’d been doing photography for about 10 years, and I was not completely satisfied,” he said. “In 2003, a friend was making a film, and I followed the process and got really interested.

“It was the same year I discovered Burning Man, and I decided I wanted to make a film about it. It seemed like a great place to do a film.”

The film took Bonin five years to complete. “I started to do a lot of research trying to connect the dots and asking everybody I would meet what they knew about the event,” he said.

Digging deeply into the history of the 23-year-old festival, he found some surprises.

“I heard a lot of people telling me how it’s going to change the world,” he said. “People were telling me how Burning Man is so welcoming, so embracing of everybody’s differences.

“But I could see that there were regular politics there, like there are everywhere else. It was not as pure as people were telling me.”

Seeing clearly

By Meredith J. Cooper meredithc@newsreview.com

QUITE A SPECTACLE From its inception on a beach in San Francisco, Burning Man has been at once an experiment in community, art, living in harsh conditions and fiery, dirty fun. The event coincides with Labor Day Weekend.

Preview Dust & Illusions shows June 25, 6:30 and 8:30 p.m., at the Pageant Theatre. Q&A follows. Tickets $7 presale, $9 at the door (8:30 show sold out).Pageant Theatre 351 E. Sixth St. Related Web site: dustandillusions.com

For those who have never made the trek out to the Nevada desert for Burning Man, the concept can be difficult to envision. A huge gathering of people, camping in the dust, creating impossibly large pieces of art, partying, and at the end, burning a wooden man—that’s the down-and-dirty of it. But, as documentary filmmaker Olivier Bonin shows in Dust & Illusions, it’s about so much more.

“What I see as being really important about Burning Man is all these people working creatively together to build something,” Bonin said by phone. The Frenchman, who’s been in the U.S. for a decade, discovered the event in 2003. Four days on the playa were enough to inspire him, then a hardware engineer, to pick up a video camera—something he’d never done before. “It helps people think about the impact they want to make with art.”

The documentary, which will show at the Pageant Theatre on June 25 (the 8:30 show sold out last week, so he’s added a 6:30 showing as well), is his message to that effect: It’s always been about art and pushing boundaries, and Burning Man could use a little more of both.

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. Even the move to Black Rock Desert in Nevada grew out of an experience driving out there to witness a few dozen crazy artists play a giant game of croquet on the playa.

One of the most mesmerizing aspects of Dust & Illusions is that Bonin was able to track down footage of many of these events, from the first burn to the croquet game to the Suicide Club (one of the originating groups) hosting a formal dinner on the Golden Gate Bridge.

“A lot of people film out there, but it’s almost impossible to get hold of that footage after the event,” Bonin said.

Well, he did. And as part of his artful contribution—beyond this documentary—he offered his own footage to the art groups he filmed. It was these groups, after all, that inspired him to create the documentary in the first place.

One of these groups, which figures fairly prominently in the film, is the Flaming Lotus Girls, a large group of creative women—and men—who work year-round to build large-scale fire art. “I wanted to see Burning Man through their eyes,” Bonin said. After his second year at the event, he chronicled their work from design to completion.

During that process, he said, he learned a lot about the inner workings of the Burning Man Corp. and from there gained access to a wide range of people who are intimately involved. Through their interviews, he’s able to show the struggle between allowing Burning Man to grow while still maintaining its original mission: to challenge normal society, create art and community.

“Burning Man has the potential to put a stronger emphasis on the art. That’s something I think is so important, so forgotten in education, and in our everyday lives,” Bonin said. He finished the interview with a challenge to loyal burners: “If they really love this event and want it to continue, they need to think, ‘How could we renew it and reinvent it so it is as important as it was to the people who started it 20 years ago?’ ”

After 2 successful screening this month, Steve Jones wrote the following review in the San Francisco Bay Guardian: “Burning Man film revives key conflict”.

A new film about Burning Man – Dust & Illusions, which has its first public screening tomorrow night at CELLspace in a benefit for the fire arts collective Flaming Lotus Girls – revives questions about whether the rapidly growing event has missed an opportunity to transform itself from the best party on the planet into an important and enduring sociopolitical movement.

San Francisco filmmaker Olivier Bonin has been shooting footage for the film (which is still in rough form and awaiting final editing and a soundtrack) for more than four years. Much of his time has been spent with the Flaming Lotus Girls, who we were each embedded with when I did a nine-month immersion journalism project with the group in 2005.

Bonin has collected some amazing archival footage from the event’s early years and he scored insightful interviews with significant originators such as John Law and Jerry James, offering viewers a sense of what a collaborative effort the creation of the modern event was. Founder Larry Harvey comes off as sort of the last man standing and the often uncomfortable interview footage with Harvey certainly doesn’t help dispel the accusations that there’s a leadership vacuum at the heart of an event that has come to consume so much financial, emotional, and creative capital in San Francisco. I saw Dust & Illusions two weeks ago during a screening at the Mission-based film project Rough Cuts, in which an invited panel of guests gave Bonin feedback in a structured forum. The group included some of the film’s stars, including Chicken John and Jim Mason, who led the Borg2 revolt that serves as the main conflict in the film.

Everybody liked the film, and everyone agreed that Harvey didn’t do himself or the organization any favors, chain-smoking through his interviews and sometimes coming off as petulant, obtuse, or impervious. But the film is far from a hit piece, celebrating the beloved and bemoaned event while musing about its potential for more.

“To me, Burning Man is still a unique and important thing, but isn’t it going to dry out if they don’t keep reinventing themselves from a leadership standpoint?” Bonin told me this week.

As the guy who wrote the series of articles that first exposed Bonin to the central conflict in his film, I have some insights into the subject matter. And I know that Harvey has been slowly nudging the event toward great sociopolitical relevance, mindful that any overt declarations of its meaning and direction could cause many of its participants to flee.

Ultimately, I think this is best film about Burning Man that’s ever been made, and the questions it raises are even more relevant today than they were when I and others first started raising them almost four years ago. Check it out.