Waste Land

2010 was a strong year for documentary filmmaking, as evidenced by the list of contenders for the Oscar. Lucy Walker’s Waste Land made the shortlist but missed out to Inside Job. But, in a manner quite different to that or the aghast Retrepo, Waste Land offers a more hopeful view of humanity, whilst not shying away from potentially difficult subject matter. This magnificent piece of work revels in the endurance of the human spirit.

The film shows us Brazilian visual artist Vik Muniz and his project to create portraits of the people who work on the world’s largest landfill site, Jardim Gramacho, in Rio de Janeiro. Muniz himself is famous for creating images using found, organic or recyclable materials, but this was his largest undertaking, with all of his profits from the sale of the final pieces returning to the dump.

Jardim de Gramacho is a vast place ransacked by carrion birds, where 70% of Rio’s household waste ends up. The pickers, or catadores, who work there earn a meagre living by collecting all of the recyclable material found and selling it to wholesale recyclers. Some of them were born there in the incredibly abhorrent conditions, where dead bodies crop up regularly, and others were from lower-middle class families who fell on hard times. What is truly remarkable about the film is not just that things have been allowed to get to such a point, but that these people actually manage to live in such an forbidding place and stay positive at the same time.

The film highlights the class problems in Brazilian society and shows how the poor catadores are drawn in by the ‘other’ world of Muniz and his crew, with potentially harmful consequences. The film answers the question of exploitation head-on, by a discussion between the artist and his wife, where he claims he is trying to open their eyes to the rest of the world for self-betterment purposes. The fact he came from a poor lower-middle class family is oft stated.

Whether or not you believe him, he did donate $250,000 to Jardim Gramacho and the subjects do seem the better for his help. It does not harp on about the environment and works better by being a human study. Depressing, eye-opening and uplifting all at once, this is an interesting film about a neglected corner of society. See it if you can.