Waste Land [14 points / 1 vote]
"My experience with mixing art with social projects is that...it's just like taking people away - even if it's for a few minutes - away from where they are and showing them another world, another place. If there's a place from which they can look at where they are, it just changes everything."
So says artist Vik Muniz in Waste Land, a fascinating, uplifting story of people on the bottom rungs of society given a glimpse of a better life and being transformed in the process. They are the backbone of Muniz's story - the favela dwellers who pick over the garbage in landfills outside of Rio de Janeiro for recyclables. At first a nameless mass, slowly their individuality is revealed as Muniz spends time with them, incorporates them into his art project and gets to know them.
Stories about the uplift of the downtrodden always risk a certain middle class egoism, and they're too often a salve for the guiltily comfortable, but Waste Land addresses hard questions about whether Muniz is really ennobling his subjects or if he's merely teasing them with a life they can ultimately never really have. It's the rare documentary that inspires without completely letting its audience off the hook. It's this tendency toward self examination that elevates Waste Land above the ordinary. It's not just one of the best documentaries of 2010, it's one of the best movies period." - Craig Kennedy
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