Waste Land

Lucy Walker (2010, Brazil, U.K., 99 min.) + post-film discussion

What is the power of art to restore humanity? It’s a huge question, but ultimately it’s the one behind a project by Vik Muniz, an acclaimed New York-based artist. In his new project, he’s traveling to the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to the Jardim Gramacho–the world’s largest garbage dump–to meet a community of people on the outskirts of society, subsisting by picking usable items from the trash dump. Despite their marginalization, they serve an invaluable role in trying to create more of a circular economy that values resources and finds reuse for them. Muniz’s project is to make artistic portraits of the pickers from the trash that they pick to sell, raising money that will go back to the pickers themselves to help lift them out of poverty.

Lucy Walker’s moving Waste Land documents this process and the power of art to build trust and social capital across societies and does so in an uplifting style (the Academy Award-nominated film won more than 20 audience awards at film festivals around the world). And it will leave you contemplating in this era of climate migrations, COVID, and social fragmentation how we can support each other, create a sense of connectedness, and stop treating people or the planet as a waste land.