“What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow/ Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,/ You cannot say, or guess, for you know only/ A heap of broken images….”
These lines from T.S. Eliot’s monumental work, The Waste Land , could well describe the omnishables of Bangalore’s landscape. Director Lucy Walker takes the title of the poem and does a hopeful spin on it in Waste Land , a documentary on garbage.
The film follows artist Vik Muniz as he journeys from his home base in Brooklyn to his native Brazil, and the world’s largest garbage dump, Jardim Gramacho, located on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. There, he photographs an eclectic band of catadores — rag pickers — self-designated pickers of recyclable materials. He collaborates with them to recreate photographic images of themselves out of garbage, which reveal “both the dignity and despair of the catadores as they begin to re-imagine their lives”.
The filmmakers promise to “offer stirring evidence of the transformative power of art and the alchemy of the human spirit.”
The film has won acclaim bagging awards such as Audience World Cinema Documentary – Sundance Film Festival 2010.
The 99-minute documentary with English subtitles will be followed by a panel discussion led by H.C. Sharatchandra, former chairperson, Karnataka State Pollution Control Board. The film will be screened at the Suchitra auditorium, 36, 9th main, B.V. Karanth Road, Banshankari 2nd stage, on Sunday at 11 a.m.
