DocFest: Off The Grid: Life On The Mesa

SFist Wendy goes off the grid, and then comes back to the land of electricity to tell us all about it!

We welcomed the return of DocFest, your local indie documentary festival, last night with Off the Grid: Life on the Mesa. It wasn’t clear we were actually going to make it in to the theater until about two minutes before it began. There was a long line for the film, which was showing in the Little Roxie, where seats are at a premium. We were pretty psyched to score our folding chair, one of the final two seats in the sold-out theater.

It was a wild ride. The "mesa" is out in the middle of the northern New Mexican desert, and consists primarily of shrubs, dirt, sand, the shells of burnt-out and abandoned vehicles, and the makeshift homes of its nearly four hundred residents. We still aren’t entirely clear to whom the abandoned land officially belongs. It’s bordered by mountains, and about five miles from the Rio Grande River. "Life" is a community of post-war veterans, runaways, and others who’ve chosen to remove themselves from society as we know it.

Was it like Burning Man? Find out, after the jump! YouTube preview clip of Off The Grid above.

SFist Wendy, contributing.