Waste Land (2010)

Directors:

Lucy Walker
Karen Harley (co-director)
(more)

Release Date:

22 October 2010 (Poland)

Genre:

Documentary

Tagline:

What happens in the world's largest trash city will transform you.

Plot:

An uplifting feature documentary highlighting the transformative power of art and the beauty of the human spirit...

Plot Keywords:

Garbage | Rio De Janeiro Brazil | Landfill | Creativity | Visual Artist

Awards:

Nominated for Oscar. Another 18 wins & 5 nominations

Cast

Vik Muniz

...

Himself

Directed by
Lucy Walker
Karen Harley		(co-director)
João Jardim		(co-director)

Produced by
Angus Aynsley	....	producer
Andrea Barata Ribeiro	....	executive producer
Jackie De Botton	....	executive producer (as Jackie de Botton)
Miel De Botton	....	executive producer (as Miel de Botton Aynsley)
Hank Levine	....	producer
Peter Martin	....	co-producer
Fernando Meirelles	....	executive producer
Emilia Mello	....	associate producer

Original Music by
Moby		(main composer)

Cinematography by
Ernesto Herrmann
Dudu Miranda
Heloísa Passos		(co-director of photography)

Film Editing by
Pedro Kos

Production Management
Tiago Arakilian	....	post-production supervisor
Mahyad Tousi	....	unit production manager

Sound Department
Aloisio Compasso	....	sound mixer
Ludovic Lasserre	....	sound recordist: London unit
Samuel Lehmer	....	sound re-recording mixer
José Moreau Louzeiro	....	sound mixer

Visual Effects by
David Breslin	....	photo retoucher
Gary Breslin	....	visual effects designer
Martin Cobelo	....	digital compositor
Ronaldo Alves de Lima	....	digital compositor
Forrest Heidel	....	visual effects producer
Maria Catherine Sandoval	....	visual effects coordinator
Raphael Zwyer	....	digital artist

Camera and Electrical Department
Barney Davis	....	Steadicam operator
Luz Guerra	....	assistant camera
Aaron Phillips	....	additional cinematography
Rob Wilton	....	camera operator

Editorial Department
Samy Waitzberg	....	assistant editor

Other crew
Shirine Best	....	development executive: almega projects
Ellie Emptage	....	production assistant
Karen Harley	....	co-director
João Jardim	....	co-director
David Magdael	....	publicist
Sophie Ollivier	....	legal and business affairs
Nour Wazzi	....	production and post-production manager

Thanks
Eduardo Lyon	....	thanks

Production Companies

• Almega Projects
• O2 Filmes

Distributors

• E1 Films Canada (2010) (Canada) (theatrical)
• Eurozoom (2011) (France) (theatrical)
• Praesens-Film (2011) (Switzerland) (theatrical)
• Tour de Force (2011) (Norway) (theatrical)
• Arthouse Films (2010) (USA) (all media)
• HBO Hungary (2012) (Hungary) (TV)
• Midas Filmes (2011) (Portugal) (all media)
• Officine UBU (2011) (Italy) (all media)

Other Companies

• Intelligent Media  international monitoring agency
• Lotus Post  sound re-recording

Also Known As:

"Lixo Extraordinário" - Brazil (imdb display title)
"Ha'omanut ba'zevel" - Israel (Hebrew title) (alternative title)
"Lixo Extraordinário" - Portugal (imdb display title)
"Smietnisko" - Poland (imdb display title)
"Vik Muniz - A szemét művésze" - Hungary
"Zivljenje na smetiscu" - Slovenia (imdb display title)

Runtime:

99 min

Country:

Brazil | UK

Language:

English | Portuguese

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1

Sound Mix:

Dolby Digital

Certification:

Portugal:M/6 (Qualidade) | Singapore:PG

Company:

Almega Projects

Quotes:

Crowd:The pickers united will never be defeated.

Movie Connections:

Featured in The 83rd Annual Academy Awards (2011) (TV)

top art is no garbage matter

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.