The news is just out, Lucy Walker‘s documentary “Waste Land” wins the Berliane Panoramic Audience Award.
I had seen her documentary “Blindsight” in 2006 and ever I read the announcement in 2008 that shewould be doing a documentary with Brazilian artist Vik Muniz I’ve been sitting on the tip of my chair.
The movie follows a group of ‘catadores’ (people who pick recycable materials in the garbage) on the world’s largest garbage dump, Jardim Gramacho, located North of Rio de Janeiro. The collaboration of Vik with these people as they recreate photographic images of themselves out of garbage reveals both dignity and despair as these catadores re-imagine their lives.
Time-lapse shots of these coalescing pictures — where unspooled film represents hair, plastic bottlecaps make outlines, sifted dust represents skin pigment — provoke a gee-whiz reaction from the audience, but more resonant is the emotional transformation of the people who have gone from climbing mountains of trash to participating in the creation of artworks they themselves inspired. (Muniz, whose art commands high sale prices, sells work in the series to benefit the Garbage Pickers Association.
The movie was filmed over three years and offers a stirring evidence of the transmormative power that comes from hope, art and the human spirit.
What Vik really wanted to do is to be able to change the life of people living on the dumpsite with through the materials they use every day.
What is most beautiful is that the film pays attention to a core issue of this project: is Vik Muniz doing his collaborators from the garbage dump a favor by exposing them to his world of art, or is he giving them false expectations about what they might do with their lives?
A question which is at the core for ever Brazilian living in poverty today as the country is growing rapidly into one of the world’s leading economical engines with a fast-growing middle class.
The answer tho the question seems different for each person in the movie. But the project brings enough good to walk out from the room with an honest cause to be hopeful for the inhabitants of Jardim Gramacho.
And last but not least: the current secretary Ambiental of the Rio de Janeiro state, Mariline Ramos, announced in June 2009 that the dump will be closed and that a Biogas factory will be build on the dumpsite, yielding 160 cubic meter of biogas a year.
Watch the trailer of Waste Land here.
