Waste Land is the Slumdog Millionaire of documentaries

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10 April 2012

Lucy Walker's Waste Land has been dubbed the Slumdog Millionaire of documentaries. Nominated for an Oscar, it has already won more than 30 awards, including the top audience prizes at the Berlin and Sundance festivals, plus the Amnesty International Human Rights Film Award.

The film, which has a special London screening tonight before its release later this month, follows the Brazilian-born artist Vik Muniz as he creates art out of garbage at the world's largest landfill on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, collaborating with the trash pickers (catadores) who work there.

Often too poor to live in the favelas, the catadores make a living by recycling and selling plastics, glass and food from the landfill.

Sometimes they uncover banknotes, guns, headless bodies. After Carnival, they pick out the discarded costumes and wear them as they work.In the film, as Muniz creates huge photographic portraits of the catadores surrounded by rubbish from the site, Walker begins to tease out the back-stories of these handsome, charismatic people. They come across as anything but passive victims. "That's the most striking thing, the good humour, sheer fun," she says.

One man who finds a copy of Machiavelli's The Prince in the landfill is inspired to learn to read. Another woman, Irma, tells the heartbreaking story of how she came to the landfill when she lost everything after the death of her baby son. They explain that they chose recycling garbage because (unlike prostitution or drug dealing) it harms no one else.

The conditions are squalid, the smell disgusting; but on a bad day they make twice the minimum wage. Many have been living here since childhood, but recently the handsome, dreadlocked Tiao - a dead ringer for Lenny Kravitz - has been organising the workers into the equivalent of a union.On paper, a film about pollution, waste-management failures and the gap between rich and poor in Brazil sounds painfully worthy. But in Walker's hands, it's a thrilling and uplifting journey. She even persuaded her friend Moby to let her use his music for the soundtrack.

"We've had amazing screenings all over the world, and it can be really fun looking at the audience fidgeting at first, and then getting pulled in. You see their faces reflected with tears, as they howl and sob and chew their knuckles," she tells me.

In the flesh, Walker, in her late thirties, is extremely striking, with high cheekbones and compelling, cat-like eyes. Her ex-boyfriends include former Labour cabinet minister James Purnell, whom she met at Oxford (where she also shared a flat with actress Emily Mortimer). Very charming, she has the ability to make you feel you are the only person in the room. And yet people in the film world can find her slightly aloof - many simply don't realise she cannot see out of one eye. "I was blind from birth so I never had any trauma," she says airily. She describes her eyesight as "more like a flat screen than people with wonderful 3D full-depth perception binocular vision" - and insists she doesn't want to be pigeonholed as a disabled director. "You know, there are lots of fantastic one-eyed film directors - John Ford, Claude Chabrol, Bertrand Tavernier, Alfred Hitchcock - just Google 'one-eyed film directors'."

Yet she has also had problems with her "good" eye - "quite a complicated health history involving extreme near-sightedness, dense amblypia [reduced vision in one or both eyes], astigmatism and neurological stuff that's not easy to summarise", she says. "I'm sure this is partly why I'm such a cinephile and visual artist fanatic, because everything visual became so precious and intriguing to me that I saw things with different eyes."

It certainly hasn't stopped her taking risks. For Waste Land, she had to film for nearly three years at the Jardim Gramacho landfill site - 300 acres full of trash, rats, dogs and discarded syringes. There was the risk of leprosy and dengue fever (she had every vaccination under the sun), as well as kidnapping by Brazilian drug gangs. Despite the heat, she spent most of the shoot in a plastic "astronaut" suit.

She first met Muniz - who lives in New York but regularly goes back to Rio - at a British film festival. For some time they had been talking about collaborating on a social project that would also make a good film. Both are fascinated by the role of "garbage" in consumer society. As an artist, he is famous for recreating images recognisable from art history using unlikely materials such as dirt, diamonds, chocolate syrup and plastic toys, while Walker had been researching landfill sites ever since visting one in New York as a student.

Although she insists that she is a film-maker rather than an activist, many of her documentaries deal with marginalised subjects. For 2006's Blindsight, which also won the audience award at Berlin, she followed six blind Tibetan teenagers as they climbed up the north side of Mt Everest with their hero, blind American mountaineer Erik Weihenmayer. She had to learn Tibetan, and climb 23,000ft above sea-level in oxygen-deprived conditions. "I was very fit - I used to race in triathlons and marathons - but mountaineering was a whole new challenge."

Clearly it was a topic close to her heart. If she'd been born in Tibet, she would have been kept in a back room, like the children in the film. "Many of them merely just had awful vision that was never corrected. And that awful vision was not nearly as bad as mine. They just didn't get spectacles. You realise how fortunate we are in this country."

Walker grew up in London, one of four high-achieving sisters (two are lawyers, the other a teacher). Her father was an executive in the toys and games industry. Cinema was her passion. One half-term holiday she went to see The Aristocats four days in a row. "After that, I'd run out of people to take me to the movies and I was inconsolable. For the rest of my childhood it was all about trying to persuade adults to take me to the cinema."

A contemporary at school was Tom Hooper, who recently directed The King's Speech. But as a girl she says it never occured to her that she could make films.

At New College, Oxford, she studied English literature and began directing plays (which she soon started filming on video, too). After graduating in 1992 with a first, she won a Fulbright scholarship to the New York University film school, by convincing them that they needed more female film directors. Here she won a contest to direct a video for Cowboy Junkies.

Her first feature documentary, Devil's Playground (2002), followed a small group of Amish teenagers in the period of "rumspringa", when they are allowed to run wild and free, before deciding to stay cut off forever from modern society. The film was nominated for three Emmys.

She gained a reputation for being able to get young people who are generally inaccessible to open up. "I also like these 'crackpots only need apply' documentaries, these goose chases."

Her aim is to give the ordinary person on the street a clearer grasp of the issues. She has a second film coming out later this year - Countdown to Zero, an exposé of the present-day threat of nuclear proliferation and terrorism, or "a non-fiction horror movie", as she calls it.

She managed to bag interviews with nuclear experts and politicians - including Mikhail Gorbachev, Jimmy Carter and Tony Blair. She eventually tracked Pervez Musharraf, the former president of Pakistan, to a safe house in a London suburb.

The film has won praise in high places. Hillary Clinton recommended it to her team at the State Department; Ban Ki-moon, the secretary-general of the UN, has also seen it.

But first on the agenda is the Oscars (on February 27), where Waste Land is up against Banksy's debut film, Exit Through the Gift Shop, and Restrepo, co-directed by British photographer Tim Hetherington (who was among American troops in Afghanistan). A win would crown not only her and Muniz's achievement but those of the film's stars.

Today the catadores appear on chat shows in Brazil and open exhibitions - they are no longer ashamed of their profession. For Walker the film is about the transformative power of art.

"I just thought that question was a good one: can you take treasures out of trash?" she says. "I think ultimately the answer is yes The film in the broadest possible sense serves as an advertisement for the benefits of creative education and positive intervention."

Waste Land is released nationwide on February 25; Countdown to Zero opens on June 24. Lucy Walker will be at tonight's UK premiere of Waste Land at Phillips de Pury (phillipsdepury.com), which will be followed by an auction of a portrait by Vik Muniz to benefit See Change (seechangewitharts.com) and ACAMJG in Rio de Janeiro.

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