Uploaded April 2023 | Updated September 2026, 11 hours ago

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Alba Roland Mejia is an Afro-Latina, queer filmmaker based in Oakland, California, whose films focus on the African diaspora. She visited Black Rock City for the first time in 2022 and shot this project on Super 8mm film. It features Rob Smith, aka Black Rock Smitty, reciting a passage from his 2020 piece, “A Letter to the Burning Man Community from a Black Man.”

"This experimental short is an intimate, character-focused exploration of the unique black experience at Burning Man. It was not my priority to capture Burning Man itself, but the energy exchange that it has with the present black bodies. I hope this piece inspires curiosity." - Alba Roland Mejia, Director/DP

Learn more about this inspiring filmmaker and what it was like to shoot in Black Rock City, and check out Smitty’s full letter, in the latest entry of the Diversity & Radical Inclusion series: journal.burningman.org/2023/04/philosophical-center/tenprinciples/alba-roland-mejia

Writer - Black Rock Smitty
Director/DP - Alba Roland Mejia
NYC DP - Jose Jesus Valdez
Additional BM Footage - Ja'rel Ivory
Edit - Little Moving Pictures

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