MUSE Film and TV

Brooklyn resident and Brazil native Vik Muniz is an artist. The documentary Waste Land starts with his idea to return to his mother country for his next project. He zeroes in on Jardim Gramacho, the world’s largest landfill, on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. Five thousand catadores, pickers of recyclable materials, live, eat, and sleep at the dump.

Muniz moves to Brazil, immerses himself in the Jardim Gramacho community and comes up with a plan. He takes photographs of the catadores, blows them up to a large scale, and with helping hands of the catadores themselves, creates mosaics of the portraits using the very trash they sift through at the dump. The results are beautiful. And the moments when each subject sees his or her own portrait are some of the best in this film.

While the project is going on, Muniz develops close friendships with the catadores, especially the portrait subjects. The documentary does an exceptional job of taking us very close to several of them. We get an honest and personal account of life on this corner of the planet and are spared no harrowing story of gruesome landfill findings. The common sentiment among the group, however, is pride for not succumbing to prostitution, drugs, or crime to make ends meet.

The project is done and large photographs of the mosaics debut at a gallery in Rio. The catadores accompany Muniz to the opening and glow from both flashbulbs and gratification at seeing a finished product: the grim arranged into the beautiful in the form of their own likenesses. The line between art and life is effectively blurred beyond distinction in a poignant way.

A portrait of a catador named Tiao goes to auction in London, where Tiao himself joins Muniz as the representative of the Jardim Gramacho workers association. The photo sells for fifty thousand pounds, which along with the proceeds from the show in Rio, go to the workers association.

The film serves as an ode to the importance of art in general. In an especially moving scene, Tiao overlooks one of the mosaic works and tells Muniz he used to think art was meaningless and didn’t get it. But his mind has changed, he says. By being a part of it, he understands and appreciates it. I guess we don’t like things that we don’t understand, Muniz responds.

One of the most interesting and unexpected scenes is a debate between Muniz and his wife about the fate of the catadores after the project is complete and the camera crew packs up. Muniz’s wife argues that it would be cruel to expect them to return to their lives at the landfill after exposing them to this world of art and glamour. Muniz argues that this glimpse into the other side will hopefully inspire them to somehow break out of their situation. Muniz comes across naïve but slightly redeems himself in an interview later in the film when he proposes, if you were a catador and were approached with this opportunity to be part of an art project, wouldn’t you take it even if you knew you’d have to return to the landfill afterwards? We must remember that Muniz is an artist. And with genuine heart he brought joy, pride, and aid to this group and raised awareness by having it documented. But what do you do after you raise awareness? The film regretfully doesn’t tangle itself too much in this philosophical thread.

From that brief debate forward, it is hard to shake that idea that perhaps this “messing with minds” is an ultimate disservice. We start to see other omissions, like the health effects of labor at Gramacho, which become painfully clear as we see a pregnant woman working and when one of the catadores dies of lung cancer. All documentaries must omit important content to keep coherent and watchable but Waste Land does almost too good a job of telling an uplifting story.

Waste Land is an Oscar nominee for Best Documentary Feature and is now playing at Cinema Village

Running time: 98 minutes

Director: Lucy Walker

Review by Christiana Cefalu