Waste Land

A documentary about the international acclaimed Brazilian artist Vik Muniz, who reconstructs photos using garbage materials from Jardim Gramacho, the world's largest landfill in Rio de Janeiro, and with the help of the pickers who work and dwell there. An both artistically tantalizing and sociologically empathizing body of work.

This film has indeed reminded me that it is the one should have used the 4D gimmick which brazenly hyped by SPY KIDS: ALL THE TIME IN THE WORLD IN 4D (2011). With a bit odor touch, it could enhance more on the turmoil what we are watching in the landfill, and it is an extraordinary case that the sense of smell could actually have played a more essential role in the film genre.

Anyway, the environment-concerned stress has never been under the spotlight here, being a documentary about art and garbage pickers, one possible pitfall is the condescending inclination, but blithely it is not the case for this film, instead it spends most of time on the individual pickers who are involved in making this project, it captures many poignant moments behind their own stories. No doubt, Vik's work does have a pivotal role of altering the pickers lives, but the film does not overwhelmingly hinge on the process of making those artworks, and which perfectly encapsulates a more sublimated obligation in additional to a general aesthetic percipient, to change the world in a better way, and Vik and his team has done it, a tenacious and awe-inspiring job.

Apart from the riveting story, there are several panning scenes of the landfill are astonishing, our life is linking with garbages everyday, but most of us act like they are thoroughly vanishing from the earth after when they are being discarded in the dustbins. After watching this film, we might be coerced to face some soiled corner of our life which we are selectively and subjectively ignoring, and starts with the most basic one: behave yourself.

"Waste Land" is a film that I picked up with interest. While the cover-art of the documentary caught my attention, the film itself proved to be much more complex, engaging, and fascinating, than I had originally imagined. A great documentary that captures: a time, place, and the ideology of a social group, working in the background of the ever present, cultural ideology.

Lower class lives are explored in a manner which not only illuminates the struggles that these individuals must go through, on a day to day basis, but also makes it clear that the cultural environment ; or landscape in Brazil, is changing.

Vic Muniz's art has never been as influential as when he decided to spend 2 years at the world's largest landfill outside of Rio. The catadores or pickers became his subjects, a ragtag group of Shakespearean types who love what they do for a living, making something out of someone else's nothing. Waste land is the title for this engrossing documentary about art as few have experienced it till now.

Making a living is what they made until Muniz changed the way they looked a recyclables. He bonded the artifacts with the humans and created memorable portraits of the pickers. A show in London, which they attended, became a catalyst for change in their lives and in the lives of spectators who had no idea Rio's garbage had become Rio's recyclables under the hands of these professional pickers.

Muniz makes sure no one condescends, no one feels sorry for his subjects, some of whom have never known anything but the landfill and others who have chosen it rather than deal drugs or prostitute themselves. Waste Land is as dignified a story about the potential of the poor class to rise out of its garbage and transform it into art and a better life. For this reason, Muniz can stand with the great humanitarians like Albert Schwitzer and Mother Theresa.

I had only heard little about 'Waste Land' and didn't know what to expect other than be introduced to some artworks by Vik Muniz. Also the concept of making art from garbage and involving the garbage pickers who work at the dumpsite got me curious. What I got from this film in the end was far more than what I expected. The camera follows Muniz to the world's largest waste land in Rio de Janeiro. One by one the viewer is introduced to some of the people who work there while Muniz proposes his project to them. The people, who are considered by many, to be of the lowest of classes, are portrayed beautifully as high spirited people, in this film. Just like any other common working human being, the pickers work hard to provide for their families and many of them are quite proud of what they do . There is also a wonderful sense of unity. What Muniz offers them is to be a part of something big, to dream again. It's a sight to behold, when the workers' faces light up as they realize they are becoming/ have become a part of something unique, beautiful and important. These are three adjectives that I'd additionally use to describe this inspiring, insightful and unique gem.

In one of the several memorable sequences in 'Waste Land' world famous artist Vik Muniz teaches his audiences about looking at art in a museum. People tend, he tells them, to get closer to the painting, then farther, then closer, then farther again, several times. When they are far away they get the overall idea of the art work. When they get close they try to understand how it is made. From far they see the idea. From close they see the matter.

The great idea of the documentary directed by Lucy Walker is to describe the process of creation in which the subjects are the Brazilian garbage pickers, called 'catadores' while the matter is the recyclable materials extracted from the huge garbage ground called 'Jardim Gramacho', which gathers most of the waste of the huge metropolis of Rio de Janeiro. However this is only the inner circle of this smart film, as the first part describes the search that triggers the project in which the artist explores the space of the big garbage dump. At first it looks like one of its work, a square on the map, getting closer men seem to be visible at the dimensions of ants, then zooming in we discover a full human landscape composed of people who may be working physically in garbage but they do it with pride and dignity and a sense of purpose of their work and its benefits for the overall good of the community. The human dimensions of the characters discovered by Muniz are best material on which relies the quality of his art and the quality of the film director Walker made about the process of creating his art.

'Waste Land' is beautifully filmed, the characters are well chosen, and one can say that garbage never looked so beautiful and full of colors and the garbage people never looked so clean and sexy as in this film. There is one more ethical question that needs to be asked about the realization of this documentary. By picking a few of the people of 'Jardim Gramacho' and making them for a few months part of the artistic creation process, Muniz, Walker and their teams took them out of the social medium they were living in and exposed them not only to art, to better work conditions, but also to the broader world living at a very different pace, social relations and living standards. Even as the money raised from the selling of the works returned to the people involved and to the social activities in the 'garbage garden' I could not ask whether the human involved will be able to get back to their previous work, or even as they use some of the cash earned for the participation in the project will they be able to overcome the short glimpse they witnessed of the world of glamor of art trade? Although Walker's documentary tried to give a rather positive answer to this question I could not avoid a slight suspicion of manipulation, or at least of a self-righteous perspective of the facts as they were presented. But maybe I am just over-concerned, or maybe Muniz and Walker are right in their approach, and the path to help the under-privileged of this world starts not with 99 or 100 of the lucky ones enrolling to help, but with the first of the 100.