Film Spotlight: Waste Land

Filmmaker Lucy Walker and artist Vik Muniz transform garbage into art.

By Jennifer Pappas
Published: December 8th, 2010 | 12:00am

Lucy Walker is a woman’s woman—passionate, talkative, joyous. Her personality effuses all the appealing qualities people look for in a confidant or partner in crime. As a documentary filmmaker (Countdown to Zero, Devil’s Playground) she’s equally ardent and distinctive, residing comfortably in the ‘full submersion’ camp of filmmaking. Her newest film—currently being released around the world, is Waste Land. Altogether touching, symbolic, artistic and compassionate, it’s a story deeply rooted in contrasts and transformations. It’s a film about people mired in poverty, garbage, and strangely enough, hope. Most of all, it’s a film about changing people’s lives.

Three years in the making, Waste Land is a collaborative effort between Walker and the world-renown Brazilian artist, Vik Muniz. The story follows Muniz as he makes his way from his studio in Brooklyn, New York to the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro and Jardim Gramacho, the world’s largest landfill. There, he befriends a spirited group of catadores—self-appointed pickers of recyclable materials who eke out a meager living in the dump, sifting through mountain after towering mountain of garbage. Though his initial plan was to photograph the catadores at work, the project quickly takes off on his own trajectory, with Muniz eventually hiring a small group of pickers to recreate their own portraits on a grand scale, using the very materials they deal with everyday.

Muniz and Walker share a likeminded fascination with garbage that goes back a number of years. As a visual artist, Muniz is interested in the tension between image and material, and has forged a highly successful art career for himself using unconventional items. Walker’s interest stems from a visit she paid to Fresh Kills landfill with a group of NYU graduate students in 2000.

“I always thought I was a really good recycler but I hadn’t really thought about it until I went to Fresh Kills.” She remembers. “It was only when I got there that I suddenly thought, wow, I have never sufficiently grasped that garbage doesn’t vanish, that it’s physically present in the world—that everything you throw away goes someplace. And in this case, if you were living in New York City in 2000, it was going to Fresh Kills. It was such a horrifying revelation that every single thing I’d ever thrown away was under there.”

From the first morning they enter the landfill to the moment the catadores see their finished portraits atop the catwalk in Muniz’s rented studio in Rio, Walker’s cinematic vision is clear, and never more so than when she’s filming the catadores at work. She imbues each character with a deeply human sense of dignity and pride, documenting their playful jokes and daily struggles as they gradually begin to see the change art is making in their lives. Hers is an unflinching look at the obvious disparities between poverty and wealth, worthlessness and meaning, excess and art. Despite the marginal role the catadores play in society, they are true environmental stewards making a huge and positive impact on the earth.

“There’s a sense of genuine pride and rightly so,” Walker explains. “When you look at recycling statistics, the U.S. has 30 percent of the world’s waste— 90 percent of that could be recycled but only 34 percent is. This is horrifying, what we’re throwing away. The catadores actually have a tremendously high recovery rate. They take out 200 tons of recyclables a day with their own bare hands. This is outrageously commendable dirty work they’re doing. There’s something sort of brilliant about this that maybe gives them a clear conscious, and it might be disgusting, but they can take a shower and they’ll be fine, in fact they’ll be more than fine because they know they’re doing a good thing.”

Near the end of the film, Walker pans in on Magna, a woman who’s worked in the landfill since her husband lost his job, as she deftly puts many of the film’s issues into stark perspective. “It’s easy for you to be sitting there at home in front of your television consuming whatever you want, tossing everything in the trash and leaving it out on the street for the garbage truck to take it away.” She pauses briefly before looking directly into the camera. “But where does that garbage go?”

All the money generated from Muniz’s artwork ($64,097 for one portrait alone) and film festival prizes has been donated to the Association of Pickers of Jardim Gramacho (ACAMJG). Visit wastelandmovie.com to make a donation, and to find a screening near you.