Olivier Bonin’s “Dust and Illusions: 30 Years of History of Burning Man,” which captures and analyzes the annual counterculture art festival in northern Nevada, has allowed the French-born San Francisco resident to travel the world for special private screenings. One of these screenings will take place with the director in attendance tonight at 9:30 p.m. at the Bijou Art Cinema.
Not available in any electronic form, director Olivier Bonin has taken a classic approach to distributing his movie by simply taking it to each city, showing it for one night and leaving. Bonin chose this format as a way of challenging viewers to really listen to the documentary.
“Showing a film electronically is great because you can get cash out of that, but when you go into a theater to watch a film, there is really a different experience,” Bonin said. “In a theater watching a film, the experience is much stronger; you really listen to everything being said.”
“‘Dust and Illusions’ is intellectual and has a lot of talking in the film and there is a lot of detail not to be missed. I was attached to show it in the theater,” Bonin said.
So far this approach has taken Bonin to Australia, Finland, the United Kingdom, Germany, New York, San Francisco and 100 miles north at Cinema 21 in Portland.
Bonin, who had never made a film before “Dust and Illusions,” chose to cover the event after attending the festival.
“One of the great things about documentary, for the filmmaker, is you explore a subject with angles and perspective that you would never have if you were not doing a film about it,” Bonin said.
Wanting to critically and accurately document Burning Man, Bonin took five years to complete the project.
“As a French person, I wanted to be critical of the subject I was studying, but I didn’t want to be shocking or too provocative,” Bonin said. “I went to Burning Man for the first time in 2003 and started the project in 2004. I ended up wrapping up the editing in 2009.”
For those not familiar with Burning Man, it is a week-long destination festival that takes place in the Black Rock Desert in northern Nevada. It starts on a Monday and ends on the following Sunday before Labor Day. First held on Baker’s Beach in San Francisco, the festival’s most famous attraction is the incineration of a large, man-shaped wooden figure. Due to its focus, a large, temporary, half-circle city is formed with the burning man in the center.
Although the event is most well-known for its climax, the festival has stood as a platform for multiple causes and beliefs. Each year, Burning Man is governed by 10 principles: radical inclusion, gifting, decommodification, radical self-reliance, radical self-expression, communal effort, civic responsibility, leaving no trace, participation and immediacy. Up for interpretation, the festival stands as an attempt at bringing together a utopian counterculture that lives as a community, fostering individual thinking and art.
In “Dust and Illusions,” Bonin presents this history and ideology while also documenting the evolution of the festival. Through 21 key interviews and rare archive footage, Bonin probes the possibility that the festival has strayed away from its original intentions, now standing as a materialistic celebration revolving more around partying than celebrating art.
The arc of the film is about creativity inside the festival. It deals with the growing community that such creativity has attracted and how people can become confused by that creativity. It comes to a point where the festival is more about partying and celebrating than actually focusing on art and artists. 
Bonin spent as much time during the filming process away from the camera as he did standing behind it.
“I spent a lot of time with people whose interviews are featured in the film. Just speaking and trying to understand where they’re coming from. It was really critical to me to understand them beyond that, to spend some time with them and live with them,” Bonin said. “When I finally did the interview for the film, I could go beyond what the interviewee was going to give me.”
Once the shooting was complete, Bonin estimated he had around 50 hours of compiled interview clips. The film itself has roughly an hour of total interview content, making the editing process very involved and taking almost a year to compile.
Bonin believes the time involved was worth the completed product.
“I was surprised that in the end the final product has been appreciated by a lot of people. People come at the end of the screening and tell me it was great and was pretty balanced,” Bonin said.
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