Hulu has shared FYRE FRAUD, the streaming platform's documentary film on the creation and breakdown of Fyre Festival, the disastrous 2017 music festival. Watch a trailer for the film above. It includes an interview with Billy McFarland, who co-founded the festival with rapper Ja Rule, and who is now serving six years in prison on wire fraud charges relating to the festival.
FYRE FRAUD is directed by Jenner Furst and Julia Willoughby Nason. Read their statement below via a press release:
FYRE FRAUD is more than the story of a failed music festival in the Bahamas—this dark comedy is a cautionary tale for a generation.
Billy McFarland offers us a window into the mind of a con artist, the insidious charm of the fraudster and how they can capture our imaginations, our investment, and our votes in the age of Trump. McFarland’s staggering ambition metastasized in a petri dish of late-stage capitalism, corporate greed, and predatory branding, all weaponized by our fear of missing out.
Our aim was to set the stage for a strange journey into the moral abyss of our digital age, going beyond the meme to show an ecosystem of enablers, driven by profit and willing to look the other way, for their own gain.
We draw on countless cultural references, on true crime tension, and on humor—but we did not intend to create a toothless comedy about the Fyre Festival. We hope this film can pierce our collective apathy and disrupt our own millennial peers, if only for an instant—to look at these stories for what they truly are, and to halt this algorithm before it devours us whole.