Fireworks, fiesta a thrilling mix

In Tultepec, Mexico, fireworks are more than just an entertainment source. They are the soul of the city. They’re also its main industry — pyrotechnics firms employ most of the residents — and the heart of an annual, nationally attended 10-day festival in which citizens risk life and limb to celebrate in showers of colored flame.

Director Viktor Jakovleski’s brisk documentary “Brimstone & Glory” inserts itself directly into the preparation and execution of this event with a disorienting closeness that gets at both the thrill and the terror. (For example, occasional shots from GoPros attached to workers dangerously climbing spinning-wheel behemoths of reed and wood called “castillos,” later to become spark-shooting towers.)

A city dotted with tiny brick warehouses and workshops labeled “peligroso” (dangerous), Tultepec prides itself on the rowdy, inexact science of its homemade combustibles — chemistry as deregulated sport. Nothing personifies that more during San Juan de Dios — named for the patron saint of fireworks makers — than the elaborately decorated, explosive-rigged papier-mâché bulls that are paraded, then ignited, in crowded streets.

The movie has adrenaline on its mind too as day prep turns to night frenzy, with a percussive score by Dan Romer and “Beasts of the Southern Wild” filmmaker Benh Zeitlin that signals a neverending party. “Brimstone” is less successful as it edges toward an impressionistic immersion into fire and fiesta, but as you-are-there experiences go, it has energy to burn.

“Brimstone & Glory.” In Spanish with English subtitles. Not rated. Running time: 1 hour, 7 minutes. Playing: Landmark NuArt, West L.A.