Review: ‘Brimstone & Glory’ documentary combines thrills and terror of Mexican fireworks festival

In Tultepec, Mexico, fireworks are more than just an entertainment source. They are the soul of the city. They’re also its main industry — pyrotechnics firms employ most of the residents — and the heart of an annual, nationally attended 10-day festival in which citizens risk life and limb to celebrate in showers of colored flame.

Director Viktor Jakovleski’s brisk documentary “Brimstone & Glory” inserts itself directly into the preparation and execution of this event with a disorienting closeness that gets at both the thrill and the terror. (For example, occasional shots from GoPros attached to workers dangerously climbing spinning-wheel behemoths of reed and wood called “castillos,” later to become spark-shooting towers.)

A city dotted with tiny brick warehouses and workshops labeled “peligroso” (dangerous), Tultepec prides itself on the rowdy, inexact science of its homemade combustibles — chemistry as deregulated sport. Nothing personifies that more during San Juan de Dios — named for the patron saint of fireworks makers — than the elaborately decorated, explosive-rigged papier-mache bulls that are paraded, then ignited, in crowded streets.

We meet a young boy who’s justifiably nervous about going into the family business, but nevertheless lights up at the spectacle, and is told he has “gunpowder in his blood.”

The movie has adrenaline on its mind, too, as day prep turns to night frenzy, with a percussive score by Dan Romer and “Beasts of the Southern Wild” filmmaker Benh Zeitlin that signals a never-ending party. “Brimstone” is less successful as it edges toward an impressionistic immersion into fire and fiesta, but as you-are-there experiences go, it has energy to burn.

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In Spanish with English subtitles

Not rated

Running time: 1 hour, 7 minutes

Playing: Landmark NuArt, West L.A.

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