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The old expression says one man's trash is another man's treasure. For artist Viktor Muniz it's art.
Vik (as his friends call him) lives in Brooklyn but is a native of Brazil, and decides to return home to literally make art out of trash.
When he arrives, he encounters "pickers," people who make it their profession to scour Rio de Janeiro's landfills in search of recyclable materials, which can make them, in Brazilian bucks, pretty good money.
The downside, of course, is that they spend all day digging through trash and muck. But we learn their stories as well. People who live with their parents or children (sometimes both) in places most of America's poor would consider beneath them.
Vik selects pieces of trash from the landfill to depict the people who dig through it, and creates some rather novel pieces from it. It's as innovative an endeavor as you'll see, and even to a layman like this writer, it's easy to see his competency.
As the art progresses, you see people who lead, by our standards, hopeless lives, resigned to their lot in life. But they transform slowly as they see what Vik makes out of them.
In part the film is a treatise on the importance of literacy in a land where a large portion of the population can't read, and those who can are willing to do things like hide a book that, in the US would be tossed away, and hide it behind a refrigerator to dry it out so they can read it.
But it's also a tale of hope, and a rather convincing one, a story of real people that make us believe in the power of us.
It seems strange to say, but there are beautiful shots of the landfill, where pickers are standing as trucks dump loads of garbage, and it rolls in like the tide at their feet. The shots are fantastic.
Of course, there is an indirect environmental message about conservation, as Vik creates out of what others discard, and in this case it's what even the trash pickers don't want.
The film that comes out is likewise a tremendous effort, entertaining and enlightening.