Synopsis
An uplifting feature documentary highlighting the transformative power of art and the beauty of the human spirit. Top-selling contemporary artist Vik Muniz takes us on an emotional journey from Jardim Gramacho, the world's largest landfill on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, to the heights of international art stardom. Vik collaborates with the brilliant catadores, pickers of recyclable materials, true Shakespearean characters who live and work in the garbage quoting Machiavelli and showing us how to recycle ourselves.
Your Movie Library
Cast
- Vik MunizHimself
Recommendations
- 90
The New York Times
"We are not pickers of garbage; we are pickers of recyclable materials," Tião, an impoverished Brazilian catadore, or trash picker, declares to a talk-show host in Lucy Walker's inspiring documentary Waste Land. - 88
Philadelphia Inquirer
It's not a very good title, Waste Land - this isn't a bleak film, at all - but just about everything else in Lucy Walker's documentary works, and illuminates. - 83
The A.V. Club
Though narrower in scope and lacking the first-person angle, Waste Land resembles Agnès Varda's great 2000 documentary "The Gleaners & I," particularly in its awe of tough, creative, hard-working people who live on the margins. - 80
The Hollywood Reporter
Overall, though, the project brings enough good into this rough corner of the world that viewers can walk out with honest cause to be hopeful for its inhabitants. - 80
Variety
Lucy Walker's Waste Land takes his (Vik Muniz) project one step deeper by actually getting to know Muniz's models, which brings a compelling human-interest dimension to the sort of art documentary otherwise better suited for TV. - 80
Village Voice
A fascinating look at the complex intersections of art and charity, reality and perception. - 75
Washington Post
Spend some time there, thanks to the documentary Waste Land, and you start to get the sense that, amid the trash, something really is blooming. - 75
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
While we await the definitive documentary about the glut of garbage, Waste Land reduces this global catastrophe to touchingly human scale.
