Netflix has shared the trailer of its forthcoming documentary about the infamous Fyre festival - and it looks like a worthwhile watch when it hits the streaming channel next week.
As you'll probably recall, in April 2017 punters were charged a quarter of a million pounds per ticket for a festival that was supposed to be held on a private island in the Bahamas. Organisers Ja Rule and Billy McFarland enlisted a slew of influencers to star in its hugely misleading marketing campaign, including Bella Hadid, Lais Ribiero, Alessandra Ambrosio, Emily Ratajkowski and Elsa Hosk.
It all sounded great in theory – luxury accommodation, gourmet food and beautiful weather – but, in reality, revellers arrived to tents often used in refugee camps, flooding and wet sandwiches. Many local Bahamian people, who'd worked for weeks to construct the stage sets, went unpaid. There was also no return travel, so guests remained trapped on the island. It has since been billed 'Lord of the Flies for rich people', with McFarland having been jailed for six years for fraud.
In the Netflix documentary which is out on 18 January, Chris Smith, the director behind the Emmy-nominated documentary Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond, speaks to the festival's organisers to find out what really happened and what caused the disastrous turn of events.
'Fyre really played into this idea of perception versus reality,' Smith told Entertainment Weekly. 'They created this amazing facade in their marketing materials, but in the same way that social media is often used to show the best parts of our lives, what was beneath the surface was something entirely different that had very dramatic real-world consequences.'
Although the documentary doesn't feature McFarland (Smith claims McFarland wanted to be paid to appear, which the director wasn't comfortable with 'after so many people were hurt as a consequence of his actions'), it does feature interviews from the local workers exploited for labour, ticket-holders who admitted to adopting a “looting mentality” during the chaos, and the event producer.
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