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, conflagrant 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 papier-mâché 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. It is a celebration that anchors a way of life built around a generations-old, homegrown business of making fireworks by hand.

For the people of Tultepec, the National Pyrotechnic Festival is explosive celebration, unrestrained delight and real peril. Plunging headlong into the fire, BRIMSTONE & GLORY honors the spirit of Tultepec’s community and celebrates celebration itself.

Edited by Affonso Gonçalves and scored by Dan Romer and Benh Zeitlin, the creative team of Oscar nominated film BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD.

★★★★★ "This is a dizzying, beautiful, awe-inspiring and deeply wonderful film." - STUFF.CO.NZ

"The heady mix of beauty and lunacy will have you giggling in amazement." - NZ HERALD

"Mixing sheer spectacle with human-interest threads, Viktor Jakovleski’s first directorial feature is a poetical, entrancing documentary.” - DENNIS HARVEY, VARIETY

“I can’t recall a movie that better demonstrated the thin line between danger and euphoria” - PASTE