Burnouts—those burnt rubber tire marks scrawled onto asphalt—are a familiar sight in rural Nova Scotia. While most people disregard these tracks as a sign of a near accident or the product of reckless teenage drivers, rural artist and filmmaker Ariella Pahlke sees burnouts as something beautiful.

In this hour-long documentary, Pahlke guides the worlds of contemporary art and car culture into an unexpected head-on collision.

Burning Rubber challenges conventional ideas about what forms of self-expression are valued as art. It explores how identity, class and gender come into play every time a car screeches out of a parking lot, leaving a signature of smoking rubber behind.