Waste Land
Melbourne International Film Festival, 07/08/2010
Status: Behind by 12 films
No matter how bad things are, there’s always someone worse off. The pickers at Jardim Gramacho - some of the poorest people in Brazil who pick through the garbage at the world’s largest tip for recyclable materials to sell to recycling wholesalers - have a chorus of “at least I don’t do drugs” and “It’s better than turning tricks at Copacabana”. Sure it is, but not by much.
Vik Muniz, a New-York based artist who incorporates unusual materials into his works (most famously, a series of portraits of the children of sugar plantation workers done in refined sugar), is fed up with the fine arts world he inhabits and wants to reaccess his roots. Remembering what life was like as a poor Brazillian, he returns home to Sao Paulo and begins a project with a hand-picked group of Jardim Gramacho pickers. Muniz wanted to create art with and for these people, sell it and have the proceeds go entirely back to the pickers’ association.
He met and photographed several characters, all with desperate circumstances but some serious dignity. The portraits were then projected, large-scale onto a concrete floor and the pickers arranged recyclable materials (the materials of their lives and livelihood) to recreate the images. And the results - both the artworks and the impact on the pickers - are astounding.
Director LUCY WALKER (Devil's Playground, Blindsight) engages on several levels - the human, the societal and the artistic - and, astoundingly, the film successfully resonates on each.
