Waste Land (Director: Lucy Walker): Last summer in Toronto we had a garbage strike, and after a few weeks garbage began being piled up in outdoor skating rinks and other city property. Suddenly our trash wasn’t something we could throw away and forget about; we were living next to it, and it stunk. I sincerely hoped that when the strike was settled, people wouldn’t forget the images and the smells, and that it might lead to a more thoughtful approach to recycling, composting and other ways of reducing the amount of stuff we toss away. I’m sad to say that the citizens of our city went right back to our old ways, but it’s always good to be reminded about our garbage. Lucy Walker’s film does that and a whole lot more.
Brooklyn-based but Brazilian-born artist Vik Muniz grew up poor on the streets of Sao Paolo. Now successful beyond his wildest dreams, he decides that he wants to give something back to the poor of his homeland. Always an innovator in using interesting materials in his art, he becomes interested in the Jardim Gramacho, Rio de Janeiro’s (and indeed the world’s) largest landfill. At this massive facility, “pickers” are paid to extract recyclable materials from the enormous mountains of trash. Like worker ants, they swarm over each new load of garbage as it is dumped. There are 3,000 of these pickers, and they are represented by an association, headed by the charismatic Tiao. We meet Tiao along with a whole group of pickers who will become participants in Muniz’s most ambitious project to date. He will use garbage to construct large-scale portraits of some of the pickers, posed as if they were in classic paintings.
Along the way, we discover that the pickers have a rich subculture, and while some are proud of their work, others long to leave the dump. Many were part of lower-middle-class families until unexpected tragedies forced them into a life of scavenging. Many have worked at the landfill since they were children, and they claim with dignity that they do honest work, and that is better than selling drugs or prostituting themselves like so many other poor Brazilians.
As the pickers collaborate with Muniz on the huge mosaics, he tells them of his plan to sell photographic prints and return all the money to them. But quite apart from the money, the opportunity to use the materials they work with every day to create art has a profound effect on them. Some find new dignity in what they do, while others gain the confidence to leave picking to try something else. While I was slightly ambivalent about Muniz using these people as material for his work, Walker wisely includes a scene where he and his wife and colleagues argue about just this topic. In the end, he feels that doing anything is better than doing nothing, and I tend to agree.
One of the very beautiful themes of the film is that art is transformative. Muniz talks about that moment when the raw materials (paint, sand, even garbage) is transformed into something different. When we look at a painting, for instance, we move closer and further from the canvas to observe this effect, and with Muniz’ giant trash mosaics, the effect is even more pronounced. But quite apart from the literal meaning, we can see that the raw materials of these pickers’ lives are being transformed by this process into something even more beautiful than paintings.
Reminiscent of Born Into Brothels, Waste Land will hopefully have just as profound an effect on the lives of at least a few of its participants.
Official site of the film
Here is the Q&A with director Lucy Walker and producer Angus Aynsley from after the screening, conducted by Hot Docs Director of Programming Sean Farnel:
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Duration: 21:21
(9/10)
Tagged as:
#hotdocs10,
art,
environment,
poverty
Wendy and Lucy (2008, Director: Kelly Reichardt): I had heard a lot about Kelly Reichardt after her last film Old Joy won both critical acclaim and a number of awards. Though I still haven’t seen it (what? another film I haven’t seen? someone’s about to revoke my film blogger’s union membership soon!), I’ve been led to believe it shares a similar slow and meditative pace with her latest film. But while Old Joy examined the nature of male friendships, Wendy and Lucy explores darker territory. Michelle Williams plays Wendy Carroll, a young woman on her way from Indiana to Alaska, where she hopes to pick up a well-paying job in a cannery. Though we get hardly any backstory, it’s clear that Wendy is from a poor family and has a limited education. We watch as she carefully tallies her cash and keeps a record of her spending. She’s very much alone on this journey, except for her dog Lucy, who seems more like a family member than anyone she’s left behind. An unlucky car breakdown in a small rural town in Oregon leads to a disastrous chain of events that tears away the shockingly thin sense of security Wendy clings to. First she loses Lucy, and then has to leave the car in for repairs. In one fell swoop, she’s lost her family and her home (she’d been saving money by sleeping in her car). It’s very clear from Reichardt’s film how profoundly rural life has changed in the last fifty years or so. Everyone she encounters is either indifferent or hostile, with the exception of a fatherly security guard, and even his modest attempts at kindness seem creepy in light of the town’s overwhelming inhospitality. So much for the kindness of strangers.
Despite the relative lack of dialogue, there are a few choice lines in the script. A supermarket employee sneers, “If a person can’t afford dog food, they shouldn’t own a dog.” And when Wendy asks the security guard for change to use the payphone, he hands her his cellphone instead, observing that “no one uses a payphone anymore.” I’ve been reading a lot of James Howard Kunstler’s books lately, and his critique of suburbia rings very true in this film. Car culture has destroyed our sense of community, and technology has only succeeded in separating us from our neighbours. Wendy has been told by her government that she’s on her own, that she should pull herself up by her own bootstraps, and she is willing to try. But what if something unexpected happens. Don’t we all need a little help sometimes? The thought that kept running through my head was that if this could happen to a pretty white girl with a cute dog, then what about a Hispanic single mother, or a black man? These are the people who are struggling right in front of our eyes, and our indifference or hostility is condemning them to difficult and lonely lives.
Michelle Williams is never less than compelling in this unglamorous role. I’d been impressed with the depth she brought to her supporting role in Brokeback Mountain, but here she’s in every frame. Her stoicism and determination barely cover her vulnerability and loneliness. In one scene, she’s confronted in the middle of the night by a deranged homeless man. As he demands she keep silent, her eyes express the terror of not knowing whether she’ll live or die. After he leaves, she quickly gathers up her things and runs back into town. As she enters a gas station restroom, her breakdown is heart-wrenching. The film’s ending is ambiguous, which under the circumstances is the best way it could have ended. People like Wendy are survivors, and with or without friendship or support, they’ll go on. Hopefully, this portrait of one of the “invisible” poor among us will help us to pay a little more attention.
Here is the Q&A with director Kelly Reichardt from after the screening:
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Duration: 15:45
(8/10)
Tagged as:
#tiff08,
poverty
