'Waste Land' review: Recycler art and self-image

"Waste Land" is a film about recycling, but it's far more intriguing than the average eco-documentary. The subject is Brazilian garbage pickers, called catadores, and how an artist created striking portraits of a half dozen of them and transformed their lives.

The artist is Brazilian-born Vik Muniz, an amiable sort who has found fortune taking photographs of images made with unconventional materials, including chocolate syrup, sugar, toy soldiers and trash.

He decided on a project centering on the catadores who work at Rio de Janeiro's Jardim Gramacho, the world's largest landfill. Money from sales of the resulting art would go to the pickers association.

Seventy percent of Rio's trash winds up in Gramacho, a vast island of garbage from which the pickers extract certain materials to sell to recyclers. Each catadore has a specialty - plastic bottles, for instance, or scrap metal. One woman even takes unspoiled meat and transforms it into on-site meals for the pickers, who live full or part time at the site.

There's striking footage of the catadores at work while scavenger birds circle overhead. When a truck brings in a load of refuse, they swarm over the new material while it's still being dumped.

The catadores are proud of their work - they consider themselves recyclers, not trash pickers, which they see as preferable to such alternatives as prostitution and drug dealing.

Director Lucy Walker focuses on the workers selected by Muniz for his project, and they are a fascinating lot, including Tiao, who created the association that fights for better conditions for the catadores, and Suelem, an 18-year-old mother of two who occasionally gets to leave Gramacho to visit her children.

Muniz's technique is to photograph the pickers, then project an enormous version of the shot on his studio floor. The catadores then add refuse taken from the landfill. Muniz photographs the result from overhead, which becomes the finished piece.

Besides the money, Muniz has given catadores a new self-image and, possibly, the courage to change their lives. Despite their proud words early in the film, once they get a taste of life away from the landfill, the pickers don't want to go back. (Muniz eventually takes them to London to attend an auction of the photographs, one of which goes for $50,000.)

A debate arises among Muniz and his assistants over the possibility that they are giving the catadores false hope, and the artist makes a forceful defense of the project. The film's concluding "where are they now" segment suggests that, overall, Muniz was right.

E-mail Walter Addiego at waddiego@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page E - 7 of the San Francisco Chronicle