Waste Land

I want to share a docu made about a fellow artist. It is called, "Waste Land." Documentarian Lucy Walker follows renowned Brooklyn-based, Brazilian-born artist Vik Muniz on a sigularly ambitious project: Going to Jardim Gramacho, a vast landfill, the world's largest, north of Rio de Janeiro, photographing its catadores, pickers of recyclable materials, and then collaborating with them in transforming these photos into portraits created with recyclable materials. His purpose is to inspire his pickers to see themselves in a new way and even to re~imagine their lives.

This is one of the most touching documentaries  that I have seen in quite some time. It stirred me up with compassion and brought up some memories from the past. During the era of the hippies there were some ship yards where I lived that hired the hippies at very low cash wages to do the jobs that no one else wanted to do. The hippies would go into the closed hulls and have to perform the fiber glass resin work. The fumes from the resin and the itchy fiber glass were a daily experience. The hippies shared rent in some of the dingiest places that were filthy. But nothing like what you will see in this film...
http://www.wastelandmovie.com/
The film can be viewed instantly on Net Flix if you have it.

Jardim Gramacho update:
http://riotimesonline.com/brazil-news/rio-politics/garbage-outgrowing-rio%E2%80%99s-landfill/#

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uNC0jEt-6w&feature=related