Documentaries are always good for being a serious watch without being too emotionally draining and this one especially so with its strong emphasis on spectacular visuals alone with very little commentary or dialogue. With a running time of only about an hour it’s short as well.

The subject here is the annual National Pyrotechnic Festival in Tultepac, a small town just north of Mexico City. The whole festival apparently lasts for over a week but this film covers just two nights of it, one in which competitors build and display their so-called Castles of Fire and the following night when they run in the streets with giant bulls made of papier-mâché and covered with fireworks. During the day it shows how the manufacturing of such pyrotechnics has become the town’s primary industry, This seems to take place in small workshops and is done by hand as they mix and pack gunpowder and other ingredients. As you might expect, this isn’t terribly safe as the workers interviewed here themselves admit. Indeed a quick check on Wikipedia reveals that deadly accidents are quite frequent. Still most of them seem to accept their lot and the sheer enthusiasm and joy on display during the revelries look genuine and is infectious.

The visuals of course are every bit as great as you could hope for, captured in slow motion and at all sorts of angles including some truly impressive drone footage. I like how director Viktor Jakovleski has the camera follow a young boy for much of the film as he participates in the festivities and watching the delight visible on his face greatly enhances the awe factor. The camera also manages to catch some tense moments such as when lightning strikes one of the so-called towers and prematurely sets off some of the fireworks. At the same time, the film doesn’t shy away from the very real risk and the danger. One scene shows how a man may have been blinded by a firework hitting an eye. Another shows firefighters putting out small fires caused by the fireworks shooting in all sorts of random directions. In fact, as amazing as it would be to see all this in person and I’m sure plenty of tourists travel there just to savor the experience, with this amount of fireworks flying around there’s really no safe bystander distance and I would hesitate to be anyway nearby.

Being as short as it is, this documentary leaves plenty of detail unsaid such as how the competitions are organized, how their products are sold and how the pyrotechnics industry came to become the main business of this small town. It really is only about capturing what it feels like to be there over those two days and that’s just fine by me.