There’s a couple of art historical references in this joint UK/Brazil documentary. The first is contained in the title, which recalls the 1922 T.S. Eliot modernist poem The Waste Land. The second is in the poster, which riffs on Jaques-Louis David’s classic 1793 painting The Death of Marat which was executed during the turmoil of the French Revolution.
Those references are deliberate, and entirely appropriate, given that Waste Land documents a project by artist Vik Muniz who returned to his homeland of Brazil from his base in Brooklyn to photograph catadores who work at a giant garbage dump outside Rio de Janeiro where they salvage recyclable materials.
Lacking a comprehensive recycling plan of our own, there’s definitely a lesson in this film for Regina audiences. It screens at the RPL Theatre tonight at 7 p.m. and Sunday at 9 p.m. Here’s the trailer.
And if you’re in the mood for a doublebill, Restrepo is playing tonight at 9 p.m. and Sunday at 7 p.m. Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 2010 Sundance Festival, it was made by Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger, and documents their experience being embedded with American troops in Afghanistan in 2007. Here’s the trailer.
