Taking My Parents to Burning Man Taking My Parents to Burning Man Taking My Parents to Burning Man is a 2014 Canadian documentary film directed by Joel Ashton McCarthy and Bryant H. Boesen that follows the latter's adventures with his 60-year-old parents at the "infamous", annual Burning Man arts festival in Black Rock Desert. Their journey takes them on a road-trip from Vancouver, BC to northern Nevada in a 35-foot school bus. It provides a, "intimate, behind-the-scenes look at the preparation for, the journey to and the adventures at the least-likely family vacation imaginable." Selling out seven consecutive screenings, it won the Audience Choice Award for
Burning Man was capped at 50,000 participants and the event sold out on July 24; the attendance rose to 70,000 in 2015. The Burning Man Project endorses several smaller regional events, inspired by the Burning Man principles both in the United States and internationally. Burning Man began as a bonfire ritual on the summer solstice in 1986 when Larry Harvey, Jerry James and a few friends met on Baker Beach in San Francisco and burned an tall wooden man as well as a smaller wooden dog. Harvey has described his inspiration for burning these effigies as a spontaneous act of "radical self-expression".