What do we do with all this waste, debris, discard, junk, litter, and refuse? How can we reconstitute what life looks like on a polluted planet? Ecofeminist theorist Donna Haraway's view of "human-as-humus" reminds us that we share the same etymological roots as the earth and soil we step on. Viewing humans as one with mud muddles our speciesist superiority: as Haraway insists, “we are compost, not posthuman.” How can compost cinema turn trash into treasure? Philosopher Slavoj Žižek inspects an urban landfill in Astra Taylor's Examined Life, explaining the need to strip "ecology" of its pristine, pastoral connotations. Žižek and Haraway, along with ecocritics such as Jane Bennett, urge us to reconceptualize garbage, rot, and decay in the climate emergency. This collection of foraged films force us to recognize the vitality of so-called "dead matter" and reprocess what we know about nature/culture.
Issue curated by Jamie Uy.
The Trace Evidence video trilogy explores the geological, meteorological, and hydrological appearance of nuclear evidence secreted within the molecular arrangement of matter. Its focuses upon three events: the unearthing of ancient nuclear reactors at the uranium mine site in Oklo, Gabon in 1972, th
The saga of a spoiled tomato. Furtado's famous pseudo-documentary tracks the life of a tomato from the farm to the supermarket to the landfill, with its sardonic impersonal narrator using colorful computer graphics and archival photographs to explain capitalism and humanity.
The Lovers is the second part of a small trilogy, dealing with the extinction of memories. In the first part, The Bathers , the two protagonists were subject to the chemical decomposition of the film material. The Lovers , on the other hand, transforms an old Super8 porn film into both a tragic love
Is there anything more Canadian than a moose-antler electric guitar? After a near-death experience, retired machinist Lorne Collie started making whimsical stringed instruments. His DIY inventiveness transformed lawn rakes, stop signs, and bent pitchforks into fully playable banjos, fiddles and viol
Teslem, Dehba and Jadija work on a fish farm in the Sahrawi refugee camps. Where? Algeria, in the middle of the desert and far from their homeland. There's no sea there, but they do have fish.
This short film is a portrait of Tofino, BC intertidal artist Pete Clarkson as he crafts his most ambitious and personal project to date: a memorial to the 2011 Great East Japan earthquake and tsunami. He, like so many of us around the world, was deeply affected by the disaster. Years later, as spli
Spears From All Sides follows the young, charismatic Waorani activist Opi as he tells the dramatic story of a vehement, community-based resistance by tribal communities in one of the most remote and beautiful areas of the world. It reveals the duplicity of the Ecuadorean government and the oil compa
The art practices and impulses of two doll makers and the worlds their dolls represent, creating windows in the walls we find ourselves imprisoned in. What is art in our lives? What is home? Can practising art, sharing it, give us a possibility of sharing home in the world? Two dollmakers work in ve
In a not too distant future, a Plastic Bag goes on an epic journey in search of its lost Maker, wondering if there is any point to life without her. The Bag encounters strange creatures, brief love in the sky, a colony of prophetic torn bags on a fence and the unknown. To be with its own kind, the B
Single Stream takes a close look at the problem of waste, through a visual and sonic exploration of a recycling facility. The title refers to the "single stream" method of recycling in which all types of recyclables are initially gathered together, and sorted later at a specialized facility. With Si
Nature is beautiful. On the gushy actualities of the natural world. Decomposers, dirt, and decay, beautifully shot with a soundtrack of only breathing.
In Green Matters , Mia Mäkelä approaches the eutrophication of the Baltic Sea from a new angle. Her experiments with green algae explore their possible use with traditional rug-making techniques.
In an undisclosed location in rural Nova Scotia, retired blacksmiths John and Nancy Little live a peaceful life, tending to their beautiful vegetable garden and crafting ethereal musical sculptures out of scrap metal. Occasionally, their special skills are put to use by the local police in an effort
This film has been shot in a redundant thermal power plant in the outskirts of the city of Guwahati. DMC's interest is in constructed signs that can never be replicated or remembered and in the relationship between matter and memory. There is also an endless circularity and an unbearable silence &md
Against the Grain addresses a very important topic of our time; the relationship between the explosive growth in our use of technology and the global strain on the environment which follows. The two Danish artists Anu Ramdas and Christian Danielewitz have travelled to the industrial town of Baotou -
Located just outside Rio de Janeiro, Jardim Gramacho, Brazil, is the world's largest garbage landfill. Modern artist Vik Muniz works with the so-called catadores, the men and women who pick through the refuse, to create art out of recycled materials. Muniz selects six of the garbage pickers to pose
A Trivial Pursuit card, as it´s called in the film, locates the so-called cargo cult on the oceanic Vanuatu Island. The cult involves indigenous population groups imitating U.S. soldiers with equipment made of simple basic materials and gestures. These radio replicas made of wood and symbolic
Jacaranda trees in June in Los Angeles: full bloom, so beautiful! I stole some blossoms and made a strong smelling tea... Added vitamin c and washing soda: a perfect developer for black & white films!
663114 comes after the recent major earthquake which struck Japan. There is a desire as an artist to make something to leave behind and it is a piece of work that has been made with a feeling like that of a prayer. Credits Director: Isamu Hirabayashi Animation: Isamu Hirabayashi Music: Takashi Watan
They live on our waste, on what we leave behind. Once called guenillous (beggars), they're now known as scrappeurs —or, more nobly, recycleurs . Denis is one of them, prospecting by bicycle around his neighbourhood, sifting through garbage looking for things to sell: used furniture, crippled t
In Lesotho—a highland country surrounded by South Africa—an artist named Nthabiseng TeReo Mohanela takes discarded materials and transforms them into unique clothing and accessories. Teaching young people the benefits of recycling and re-creation, she calls her project "From Trash to Tre
How can we contain some of the deadliest, most long-lasting substances ever produced? Toxic remnants from the Cold War remain in millions of gallons of highly radioactive sludge, thousands of acres of radioactive land, tens of thousands of unused hot buildings, and some slowly spreading deltas of c
High school student and poet, Chasity Hunter, experienced intense flooding in her New Orleans neighborhood during both Hurricane Katrina and recent summer rainstorms. Inspired to find out how safe her city really is, she investigates her city's infrastructure and questions water experts, finding her
A small community of descendants of Italian immigrants in the interior of the state of Rio Grande do Sul resorts to making a video to try to solve the problems of basic sanitation that plague their village.
Tehran Recyclers portrays the diverse cultural, social and urban fabrics of this metropolis by means of experimental animation. In the urban hideouts of this city, little creatures come to life. These are digitally composed with collected waste from the streets and typical local products. The clatte
Startlingly original, lyrical ode to the flip flop and its place within our society. Ever wondered what happens to your footwear after you're finished with it? This award-winning and startlingly original documentary traces the fantastic journey of Africa's most popular shoes: the flip-flop. Easily b
Contrary to its name, so-called street art has been socially acceptable for a long time now. British graffiti star Banksy eternalized himself and his work in a movie, and the honorable Viennese Museumsquartier commissioned the guerilla tile-artist "Space Invader" to apply his trademark in its entryw
Exploring the tactility of nature and a filmmaker's desire to capture the essence of the forest floor onto film. A bizarre animation that places the viewer in front of a TV set one Saturday morning some time in the early 1970's. New memories are recorded as a super 8 camera and a roll of Kodachrome
Toxic Semiotics is a video that weaves together a semi-fictionalized story about chemical waste being transported globally. In this story that set in the future, the narrator shifts between virus, fungus, and demon, and sometimes the story is told from a human/the artist's perspective, to think abou
Hundreds of thousands of mobile phones, LCD TVs, notebooks and the likes become useless and "out" relatively soon and end up in Ghana where children and adolescents dismantle them in toxic smoke. A "clean" business for some, a poisonous routine for others.
I'm particularly interested in the memory carried by old postcard. Most of these postcards were bought in some souvenir shop in a resort somewhere. I guess that people who appear on those old postcards do not notice they are being photographed. And one cannot guess where, how and when the postcard w
Japan has been hard-hit by dreadful catastrophes in the past years: the earthquake, the tsunami and Fukushima nuclear central disaster. The filmmakers try to bring some harmony and levity in various places of the Country, supported by a copious group of people participating in a workshop, and taking
In a recycling plant in the North of France, the workers join to sing in the choir, and even trucks join them and make almost a ballet. From the functioning of the prodigious machines up to the manual labour of sorting, the film shows the process of recycling.
Every year in America, 43 billion kgs of food is thrown away. This multi award-winning film follows filmmaker Jeremy Seifert and friends as they dumpster-dive in the back alleys of Los Angeles' supermarkets. In the process, they salvage thousands of dollars worth of good, edible food and take on som
Shedding light on local and global acts of alchemy, "As Above, So Below" is a deeply personal and thought-provoking reflection on the ephemeral life of material objects. Christman's intimate documentation of her family's decision to have her stepfather's ashes transformed into a memorial diamond fra
Nikki Schuster's animistica opens with the viewer awakening as if inside a restless dream, transformed into a strange vermin. The camera assumes the perspective of an insect burrowing through the dark crumbling underground, kindred to the community of beetles swarming under the idyllic green facade
Guts is an intimate examination of environmental science practice with CLEAR, a feminist, anti-colonial marine plastics lab directed by Dr. Max Liboiron. The film is a look inside the lab and how its members try not only to do good science on plastic pollution, but how they try to change how science
Minimal explorations of society and its harmful effects on the environment. Many of us are trying to "re-" and "un-", as we recycle, reduce, reuse, to undo the damages that our growing society brings upon the environment. The impact of climate changes are clearly evident, and it might be impossible
What happens when an animal perishes in the depth of the forest? Who clears up the remains? Why aren't we surrounded by carcasses? After all, death is a constant and universal visitor … Science is on the trail of a macabre challenge: to dissect in detail what happens to dead animals in the wi
The film tells the story of Israeli artist Leni Dothan's year-long collaboration with a team of chemists from UCL, during which they developed a series of pollution-reactive sculptures to raise public awareness about the danger of pollution in London. The film follows the team from start to finish a
I shot a film through one year in the virgin forest Aokigahara Jukai on the bottom of Mount Fuji. Walking in the ocean of trees all alone, I sometimes got the feeling of being watched. At those moments, I put my camera into the direction of the "watcher." It's like I wasn't shooting the ocean of tre
Community leader and compost guru Domingo Morales shows how easy it is to compost food scraps from our kitchen table, which helps reduce carbon emissions in our battle against climate change.
human genome in hdv is generated from the complete human DNA sequence of one person. Each of the 3.271.321.261 letters in the video represents one nucleotide base in its natural progression: A – adenine , c – cytosine, G – guanine, T – thymine, n – so-called "junk DNA"
A portrait of poverty, ambition and hope set in a world of waste Laughter of playing children echoes through vast rolling hills of plastic waste. This recycling plant is home to Pen and his daughter Yi Jie, who is desperate for an education, and boss Kun, determined to improve his family's lot. Over