Walker’s “Waste Land” featured at 32nd annual Telluride Mountainfilm

“The moment when one thing turns into another is the most beautiful moment,” Vik Muniz

Mountainfilm in Telluride selected director Lucy Walker’s latest film to be included in its program line-up from among more than 600 submissions. “Waste Land,” which has already garnered a small bucket of awards including World Cinema Documentary Audience Award at Sundance, will be screened over the long Memorial Day weekend, May 28 – May 30, at the 32nd annual gathering of the tribe.

The “Waste Land” in question is not that of poet T.S. Eliot. Eliot’s “Wasteland” is a metaphor (for the disillusionment of the generation post WWI). Although poetic transformations happen there as a result of the film project, Walker’s wasteland is a real place, Jardim Gramacho, the world’s largest garbage dump, located on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro.

“Waste Land” is the ultimate caca to chocolate story. Filmed over nearly three years, Walker’s socio-political documentary follows the world-renowned artist Vik Muniz on his journey from his Brooklyn home to his native Brazil, where he befriends and photographs an eclectic band of “catadores” or pickers of recyclable materials. Not only does Muniz create large-scale photographs of elaborate installations made from the trash, he forms close relationships with some of the gleaners, whose stories of stoicism and hope are told through Walker’s empathic lens. In the spirit of Chris Jordan, a returning Mountainfilm guest photographer who also re-purposes junk, art once again transcends and transforms life. Moby-scored montages convey the other-wordly gestalt of the place.

Lucy Walker was born in London and educated at New College, Oxford. She was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to attend graduate film school at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, where she won a contest to direct a video for Cowboy Junkies, directed three award-winning shorts, and earned her MFA.
Walker’s directing credits include Nickelodeon’s Emmy-nominated “Blue Clues,” and “Devil’s Playground– Amish Teenagers in the Modern World,” which won three Emmys, including Best Directing.

“Waste Land” has been favorably compared to the Agnes Varda classic “The Gleaners,” a film rural French farmers who harvest what’s leftover at the end of the growing season. Yet another example of another person’s trash becoming recyled into someone’s else’s treasure.
 
The buzz from Mountainfilm staffers on this one is BIG: “Waste Land” is a must-see.

All Mountainfilm films @ : http://www.mountainfilm.org/festival/2010/films.asp