New Zealand's Gathering ran every New Year from 1996 to 2001, an outdoor dance party organized on Canaan Downs, a stretch of farmland atop Takaka Hill near Nelson. This film, the first documentary made about the event, covers the 1997-98 gathering, following the crew as they build a temporary city from scratch: stages, sound rigs, campsites, all raised on a hilltop with no permanent infrastructure. Once the party starts, the camera stays close to the dance floor through the long nights and the daylight hours after, catching attendees mid-celebration rather than reconstructing it after the fact. The film also steps outside the party to ask people who had to answer for it: the Mayor of Tasman District and local police give their side of hosting thousands of ravers on rural land year after year, weighing the noise, the logistics, and the town's tolerance against what the event brought. The result sits somewhere between a concert film and a small piece of local civic history, told mostly through the people who built the thing and the people who had to live next to it.