Waste Land

Movie: Waste Land

Cast: Vik Muniz

Genre: documentary

I saw it on: November 27, 2010

Synopsis: Vik Muniz is Brazil’s most acclaimed artist/photographer.  This documentary follows his efforts to do a photographic story about Jardim Gramacho – located outside Rio de Janeiro, this is the largest and busiest landfill in the world.  His story is specifically about the “pickers” at the landfill.  There are 2500+ pickers whose job is to pick through the mountains of garbage to pull out recyclables.  To give you an idea of the size of this landfill, the pickers retrieve 200 tons of recyclable material every day.

My two cents: An interesting movie.  It certainly evokes a lot of sympathy for the horrendous conditions these people live in.  My problem is that Vic swoops in, hires a crew of these pickers for a year to pose for and help construct his project.  He takes a lot fo them around the world on tour.  Then – they are put back where they started.  Some of them stayed as pickers, some tried to get away from the dead-end – some were successful.  It just seemed like they got to glimpse an incredibly better life – and then, “oh well, back you go”.

That said, I do enjoy seeing a world that I had no idea existed . . .  and the “pictures” the artist put together using only items pulled from the dump were amazing.