“It’s like filming in a wedding and a war zone at the same time,” the documentarian Jehane Noujaim said. “The conditions are harsh. The heat is intense. Batteries overheat. Cameras break down. Dust gets into lenses. And time doesn’t exist.”
Noujaim, the Emmy-winning director of documentary films and series including “The Square,” “The Great Hack” and “The Vow,” has been in plenty of fraught environments. Few have included quite so much propane, kinetic art or cheerful, filthy nudity. Her newest documentary, directed with Vikram Gandhi (“Kumaré”), is “The Man Will Burn,” a four-part series centered on the Burning Man festival, premiering Thursday on HBO.
The festival, which takes place on a vast, flat desert playa in northwest Nevada every summer, was created by a troupe of San Francisco pranksters who initially burned an effigy on a beach in the Presidio district. And then they kept burning. It has since evolved into an eight-day festival that attracts upward of 70,000 participants and costs tens of millions of dollars. Attendance, once free, now costs a minimum of $550, though participants in need can apply for $250 tickets.
A favorite destination of tech leaders and adventurous celebrities, Burning Man has weathered dust storms, torrential rains, influxes of cash from the likes of Elon Musk and accusations that it has strayed too far from its origins. (There are also serious issues the documentary does not meaningfully address, including widespread illegal drug use and an atmosphere in which sexual assault, authorities say, goes notably underreported.)
The documentary marries archival videos with recent footage that Gandhi and Noujaim began filming in 2021, as the Burning Man Project, the organization that oversees the festival, decided whether to cancel for a second straight year out of safety concerns during the Covid-19 pandemic. (They chose to move the festival online, though some 20,000 people gathered in the desert for what became known as the “Renegade Burn.”) The filmmakers returned to the playa in 2022 and 2023 — the year rainstorms brought cement-like mud that made vehicular traffic impossible, with participants (Chris Rock and Diplo among them) having to walk for miles to exit — with some additional shooting in 2024.
On a video call last week, Noujaim and Gandhi discussed experimentation, conflict and whether the orgy dome exists. (It does.) These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
How did you become interested in Burning Man?
JEHANE NOUJAIM I had been around six times, starting in 2006. I was curious about a city that comes together, that’s built by participants. It was incredible being with friends, completely offline, in a place with no money. Cellphones are gone, technology is gone and you’re in this incredible desert with sunrises and sunsets and this 24-hour world happening that you could get lost in.
VIKRAM GANDHI I went seven or eight times before this. I saw this place that was aligned with what would it be like if we lived in art and in our imagination and reinvented ourselves.
What made this a good subject for a documentary?
NOUJAIM At first we thought that it might be a terrible idea because Burning Man is such an immersive experience. It seemed almost impossible to capture that on film. But I was told they had this 35-year archive and were open to an independent filmmaker looking through it. That coincided with when we were going into Covid. As filmmakers, we didn’t know what we would ever be able to shoot again. So an archival film sounded quite interesting.
We started having conversations with the Org [the Burning Man Project]. They said, There is no way that you can film because we’re not doing anything. We may be canceling it completely. And that’s when we said, This is exactly the time to film.
GANDHI And people from all over the world, they want a window in. When we first started talking about this, I was in London having breakfast with a former prime minister of Pakistan. He goes, “Vikram, is it true that there’s an orgy dome?”
There is an orgy dome, right?
GANDHI Yes, though there is no filming in the orgy dome.
Why does Burning Man matter? What makes it more than a playground for tech billionaires?
GANDHI Burning Man matters a lot. Any place that triggers that many emotions, you’ve got to ask, what’s going on over there? I’m very critical. So much of what I want to do is unravel. Sometimes as a filmmaker, I can become a buzz kill. But it’s really hard to come away from Burning Man and not realize it’s a place that should exist. It is like another planet.
NOUJAIM The world is so polarized. Here, you have people coming together who care about this place, but who have very different beliefs. Can people with radically different beliefs, values and visions of the future still build a society together? “The Man Will Burn” is a story about how every year, tens of thousands of people come together to test whether it’s possible to build a society that’s not rooted in sameness or uniformity but in participation, imagination and shared responsibility. Sometimes it succeeds, and sometimes it fails, but in that struggle lies something profoundly human, the belief that despite our differences, we can keep trying to imagine and build a better world.
What is it like to be there as a filmmaker?
GANDHI There was not very much sleep. Jehane and I both have filmed all over the world in conflict zones, different terrains. Burning Man’s difficult. At any moment you could lose your subject. Like, literally just never see them again because there’s no communication. We’d be in the middle of an interview and a dust storm would come. I was stuck in a dust storm for an hour and a half. It is also very difficult to get your bearings. So it was an exercise in trying to be focused in a chaotic place and also allowing accidents to happen.
You have some wild cameos. I did not expect Grover Norquist. How did you choose which other famous burners to include?
NOUJAIM Zoë Kravitz was there. She has a little cameo, as does Channing Tatum. Sergey Brin, Kimbal Musk.
GANDHI We never wanted to try to find the celebrities that go to Burning Man. It’s not a place where they’re trying to be filmed. We were trying to stick to the ethos of not exploiting someone’s fame.
How has the festival changed? Has it become a victim of its own success?
NOUJAIM It’s gone through waves. The first time I went, 20 years ago, there was no cell service. If there are people now coming in just to do Instagram posing, is it still worth it? But for virgins and for people coming every year, continuing to build and imagine a different way of living, it’s an important social experiment, even though it’s riddled with all kinds of problems — diversity, affordability.
GANDHI What really changed is the outside world poured in, brought social media, brought e-bikes, bought RVs. Burning Man is gentrified. I don’t know if there will be another generation that keeps going.
At last year’s festival, there was a homicide, believed to be the festival’s first, and a surprise birth. Do you wish you could have filmed again?
GANDHI There was no part of me that wanted to film there last year. But to be honest, this is a really crazy place to throw a party or build a city. The fact there haven’t been more deaths and births — it’s more a testament to the people who go that it hasn’t happened more. It’s more a feat that it survived so long.
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