Film Reviews

Wasteland

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• Details: Brazil/England TBC TBC

We've had two documentaries in as many weeks and they couldn't be more different. Charles Ferguson's Inside Job is a downer from start to finish but is essential viewing, and while Waste Land can't be seen as essential, it's message that art can transform any life is very uplifting and will leave you with a smile on your face.

Waste Land follows Brazilian contemporary artist Vic Muniz who travelled to Jardim Gramacho (the Garbage Garden), the world's largest landfill site outside of Rio de Janeiro in 2008, to collaborate with the 'catadores' - pickers of any recyclable materials they can find in the rubbish heap and who receive $20 a day for their trouble. Vic hopes to use the catadores and the materials they've picked to create giant portraits to sell at a London auction. There are concerns with the mission: the landfill is surrounded by favelas known for their drug-related violence, there's the obvious health issue and, what turns out to be a legitimate concern brought up by Muniz's pragmatic wife, if Vic allows the catadores a glimpse of another life it may have serious psychological affects when he and his team eventually leave.

It might sound like ITV's Art Attack meets The Secret Millionaire (and to be honest there's a bit of that in here) but Waste Land has a real impact on those involved, changing their lives for the better (although it would be interesting to do a follow up in a few years to see exactly how much has changed). Vic immerses himself in the lives of the pickers, the on-site cooks, their union representatives and those who aim to educate those wishing to leave the life. In getting the pickers to help create the art, Vic is at pains to stress that the end product is as much theirs as it is his. He's right. The tears shared at the close would even move the hardest cynic; Tiao, the man who hopes to educate the catadores, and who has always been a whisker away from packing it all in, breaks down when he sees his dream come true

Apart from the feel-good nature of the documentary, it's interesting to watch the artist in action – although we can always see the finished article, the process is something we're never privy to. It's interesting too to see Walker, Harley and Jardim's film start out as solely as an exercise in this very idea (it opens with Vic on Brazil's equivalent to The Late Show) but morphs into the story of the pickers themselves (it ends with Tiao on the very same show).

Review by Gavin Burke