This documentary tells how Vik Muniz, a well-known plastic artist, decides to return to his home country, Brazil, more specifically Jardim Gramacho, the largest landfill in Latin America, to find inspiration for one of his works.
This artist is known precisely for the use of unusual materials like sugar, chocolate and garbage in his works, but above all I think his most significant feature is his human side, which is revealed throughout the documentary and that he himself shows when mixing his art with social project.
The documentary shows the deplorable and inhumane conditions in which pickers work and live in the landfill. They even make meals and eat food that they find in the landfill.
In the development of his work, the artist interacts and engages with some of these people and we begin to discover their life stories.
At the beginning, almost all of them claim to be motivated workers and very proud of their condition, but the unfolding of the documentary shows us that this is the way their minds deal with the awful reality that surrounds them.
We are also made aware of the creative process of the artist and realize how much it is based on the human factor. The artist decides to try to capture the humanity of the pickers through the garbage.
We get emotionally involved with the participants, just like the artist, because we realize that they have emotions, dreams, very strong ambitions.
At a certain point, the artist is confronted with a serious question because he realizes that his intervention with this people is creating expectations and could lead to great frustration at the end of the work.
However, what Vik and we come to apprehend is that the appetite for life and the way the pickers behave is inspiring and he decides to help them by donating all the proceeds from the sale of the works made, based on this project, so to improve the lives of these people and that is also unbelievably inspiring.
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