Brimstone & Glory

Brimstone & Glory

The National Pyrotechnic Festival in Tultepec, Mexico is a site of festivity unlike any other in the world. In celebration of San Juan de Dios, patron saint of firework makers, con agrant revelry engulfs the town for ten days. Artisans show off their technical virtuosity, up-and-comers create their own rowdy, lo-fi combustibles, and dozens of teams build larger-than-life paper mache bulls to parade into the town square, adorned with fireworks that blow up in all directions. More than three quarters of Tultepec’s residents work in pyrotechnics, making the festival more than revelry for revelry’s sake. Plunging headlong into the fire, this film honors the spirit of Tultepec’s community and celebrates celebration itself. Jakovleski’s ambitious debut is based on the principles of sensory ethnography, preferring sense data exhilaration to laborious explanation. Flickering flares, head-spinning haze, deafening detonations and thundering music – a film experience seldom gets this physical.

  • Year:
    2017
  • Runtime:
    67
  • Country:
    USA
  • Director:
    Viktor Jakovleski
  • Screenplay:
    Viktor Jakovleski
  • Dir. of Photography:
    Tobias von dem Borne
  • Music:
    Dan Romer, Benh Zeitlin
  • Editor:
    Affonso Gonçalves
  • Production:
    Court 13, Department of Motion Pictures
  • Sales:
    Mongrel International
  • Festivals:
    True/False 2017, San Francisco 2017 (Golden Gate Award), Hot Docs 2017, Sheffield 2017 (Art Doc Award – Special Mention), Dokufest 2017

Schedule:

12.11.2017 13:30 Kino Mladosť

About the Director:

Viktor Jakovleski

Viktor Jakovleski (1983, West Berlin, Federal Republic of Germany) attended the German Film and Television Academy, spent time as a Hollywood personal assistant and driver and worked with Benh Zeitlin as a co-producer and assistant director on the short film Glory at Sea (2008). In 2015, Jakovleski was chosen as one of 25 “New Faces of Independent Film” by Filmmaker Magazine. He is a producer of LenaLove (2016). After four years of making, he premiered his feature-length directorial debut Brimstone & Glory at the True/False festival.