Synopsis
What if humanity was suffocating the Earth with its own waste? Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s response to this brutal and provocative hypothesis is to look at how we are combating the endemic proliferation of our waste. Because the alarm bells are ringing everywhere. From Bangladesh to the Maldives by way of the Alps, the director creates a dizzying panorama of the places that receive rubbish and the struggle to keep this disastrous accumulation under control.
A word from Tënk
"You can always read the paper […] Here, a Nesquik ad!"
With wide, fixed shots, the director creates a veritable cartography of waste. Waste is lost, found, picked up, gathered, piled up, locked up, crushed, compacted and then driven away in bicycles, tractors, trucks, trains, boats, conveyor belts and wheelbarrows, before being burned, ashed and reduced to dust. The dust we trample and breathe. It's what we wear on our clothes and beneath our fingernails.
This omnipresence overflows the screen, striking us head-on with the slowness and mechanical noise of machines digging gigantic tombs that create new topographies. These walls of earth, coloured architectures of intact packaging, resist consumption, time and therefore… man. Plastic trees. Bottled rivers. Nikolaus Greyhalter plays with optical illusions. On one side, heavenly tourist beaches. On the other, webs of garbage. In between? Luxury hotel employees clean and sweep up the path of the West. Not for the sake of the environment, but for mere business.
Render immaculate to better reassert our imprint: dirty and immortal. Moreover, beyond the eye, cans ricochet, wind passes through plastic bags and buried water picks up and accompanies all these new sounds, these new sensations. We could listen to this film and come to the same conclusion: we surround ourselves with mountains of waste. Deleuze wrote, "To travel is to check how the TV works in another place."; we say, to travel is to pollute ourselves.
Rémi Journet
Tënk's editorial assistant
