One of the biggest movie screens in NYC will explode with light, color, and sound during this screening and live orchestral score of BRIMSTONE & GLORY, a documentary from the creative team behind Beasts of the Southern Wild about the National Pyrotechnic Festival in Tultepec, Mexico. Once a year, the festival erupts through the city, temporarily transforming it into a blaze of sparks and flames, and in the climactic “running of the bulls,” the bravest participants dance and skip amid toritos discharging fireworks, raining burning ash on everyone. Brimstone & Glory takes us on a wild and cinematic journey through the festival, focusing more on capturing the experience than explaining it. We see a crew member build a giant firework castle only to have it prematurely catch fire, watch abstract super-duper-slowmo shots of eruptions, and even spend time in an ambulance with some reckless cavorters. “Mixing sheer spectacle with human-interest threads, [the film is] a poetical, entrancing documentary.” (Variety)
BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn! Festival favorites WORDLESS MUSIC ORCHESTRA return to provide the percussive accompaniment and SONIDO GALLO NEGRO, a stunning theremin-driven nine-piece instrumental combo from Mexico City that channels both the mystique and mysticism of 1960s Peruvian cumbia, opens.
Brimstone & Glory was produced and distributed by Court 13 Pictures, Cinereach, and Oscilloscope.