Curious Minds Festival // Obsessed with Influencer Culture: Fyre Fraud Screening & Panel

Showings

Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema Fri, Mar 6, 2020 9:15 PM

Description

Featuring a special video message from The New Yorker's Jia Tolentino!

When future generations try to make sense of the past decade, no account will be complete without the story of the Fyre Festival, the failed 2017 music festival that became one of the defining symbols of an influencer-driven, likes-hungry era.

Long unavailable in Canada, Hulu’s Fyre Fraud shows what really happened behind the scenes in the Bahamas, with unprecedented access to the doomed event’s major players, including fraudster Billy McFarland, rapper Ja Rule, and insightful chroniclers like The New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino, who dubbed the festival “America’s first major all-millennial scam.” At this rare public screening, we’ll relive the epic dumpster fire on the big screen, check in with Tolentino for a special video cameo, and close with an irreverent pop culture panel unpacking its myths and its meanings. Was FyreFest evidence of some wider cultural malaise—or just a handful of grifters preying on vulnerable kids? Bring your friends—and your spiciest hot takes—for a night of drinks, debate and reflection on the decade’s biggest Instagram-fueled debacle.  

// Post-screening panel featuring:

Elamin Abdelmahmoud, Editor of News Curation at Buzzfeed News

Anne T. Donahue, writer (Vulture, The Globe & Mail, CBC ‘q’); author, Nobody Cares Except for Me


Kathleen Newman-Bremang, Senior Writer, Refinery29; contributor, laineygossip

// With a special recorded video message from:


Jia Tolentino, Staff Writer, The New Yorker; author of Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion

Promotional Partners: Drunk Feminist Films and Women in Film & Television Toronto (WIFT-T)

Additional Information