Fyre (2019)

I guess most forgot about it, but I had never heard about the Fyre Festival before Netflix's Fyre and Hulu's Fyre Fraud dropped and everyone started comparing the two documentaries. I didn't care much about the subject so I decided to skip them. Fast forward to mid-February, people were still talking about Netflix's documentary so I decided to check it out. 

Chris Smith's film gives a behind-the-scenes look into the Fyre Festival, a failed luxury music festival in the Bahamas that was created by entrepreneur Billy McFarland and rapper Ja Rule with the intent of drawing attention to Fyre, an app/website for booking famous artists for private parties and that kind of stuff.

As it was promoted by Instagram influencers such as Bella Hadid, Emily Ratajkowski and Kendall Jenner, acts such as Blink-182 and Migos was supposed to perform and was supposedly taking place on a private island that once belonged to Pablo Escobar, the tickets quickly sold out. 

It was supposed to be the next Coachella or, as McFarland said at one point, the Woodstock of Bahamas. There were supposed to be gourmet food, luxury tents and villas. But it turned out to be an epic failure. There just wasn't money to fund such an event, the promotional video was filled with lies, the concertgoers were housed in hurricane tents left over from hurricane Matthew, and they were furthermore destroyed as it rained like crazy the day before the event, and they were given cold cheese sandwiches to eat —I remember seeing that on Twitter and I thought it was a joke or something back then. Basically, the dream experience people were promised never happened, and on top of that, the acts bailed out before all the mayhem on the island even began —some of the locals who help to build the site even kidnapped people for ransom as they were not paid for their job.

Netflix

Fyre doesn't just show everything that went wrong, but it's also a compelling portrayal of Billy McFarland, a charming and energetic entrepreneur —he founded Magnises, some sort of credit card, before this and — who lied and manipulated people and stole millions in the process of selling the luxury festival to rich kids. And to be honest, those people got what the deserved. I'm not saying McFarland did a good thing because he didn't, he still committed fraud, but if you spend thousands of dollars to attend to an exclusive event so that you can brag about it on social media —because that's what those rich kids went there for, to let the world know they were there; after all, the whole festival was about image— you deserve it.

If you have Netflix, you should definitely check this out. It's compelling and fun. But also heartbreaking as Maryann Rolle, who runs the Exuma Point Bar & Grill, says how she used all of her savings, money she was going to use in case of emergencies such as hurricanes, to pay her employees.