VARIOUS: Thousands of people living and working among garbage in poverty-stricken Guatemala are brought to light in Oscar nominated short documentary "Recycled Life".

Filmmaker Leslie Iwerks explores the lives of thousands of Guatemalans, many of them children, who live and work in a huge garbage dump in "Recycled Life," an Oscar-nominated short documentary. A growing problem in the poverty-stricken country of Guatemala is brought to light in "Recycled Life," a film which is nominated for the Academy Award for best documentary short subject. Directed by Leslie Iwerks, "Recycled Life" is about the thousands of people that have been living and working in the largest landfill in Central America over the last sixty years. They make a living by recycling trash and foraging for food, enduring hazardous materials and circumstances that many would consider disgusting. "There are rats in there, there's cockroaches, there's spiders, everything -- dead carcasses, we've seen dead babies in there, we've seen dead animals -- and a lot of this was so hard to see and to witness and to document, and a lot of it I kept out of the film because I didn't want to gross out the audience. It's a pretty heavy duty environment to work in and to live in and to see day after day, and I was only working on it over four years -- these people have made their life in it," says Leslie Iwerks, director of "Recycled Life." The dump in Guatemala City is a giant crater where entire families of "Guajeros," otherwise known as garbage pickers, subsist solely on what they find in the trash. Clutching her camera, Iwerks and producer Mike Glad would descend into the pit, where filthy children raced up to the garbage trucks and scoured the refuse, plucking toys, chickens and chairs from the mounds. Kids have disappeared without a trace, apparently dissolving in the toxic gases. Originally travelling to Guatemala to film a documentary on the Maya culture, Iwerks and Glad shifted their focus when they came across two children living in a cardboard box during a routine trip to the landfill. They decided to put their previous project on hold, and over the course of the next four years, frequently returned to chart the status of several workers living in the dump. Iwerks and Glad were not sure how their film would end when they started, but then a fire in 2005 fuelled by the toxic gases alerted authorities to the danger for children working there -- and changed the course for the kids and the film. "There have been a lot of kids that are growing up in the trash, you know, generation after generation, that are picking toys and clothing and eating from the trash, and to document this and to see now that these kids, because of circumstances over the last two years, have changed, that these kids now have a better future and a better opportunity to get education and a proper upbringing, that's the story that we've told, and it's a very dark and heavy story, but it's got a lot of hope and uplift to it as well." In a tragic twist five days before Oscar nominations were announced last month, one of the film's protagonists, Hanley Denning, a Maine native who set up an educational centre for kids near the dump, died in a traffic accident in Guatemala City at age 36. Iwerks has made a posthumous tribute to Denning and put it on the DVD along with the 38-minute documentary. A portion of the proceeds with go to Denning's organization, Safe Passage (safepassage.org). "She realizes there was a huge need for these kids to have an education and a huge desire for the parents to put their kids in school for many of them. And so from that point, she said it was all or nothing, and she continued to spend the next eight years dedicating her life in this really extreme environment and helping thousands of families get a better life and a better education, and it was the hope in their eyes and the progress these kids were making that really kept her going. And she sacrificed her wealth, her social life, everything to these families, and when she was killed five days before the nominations were announced, I was just, my entire heart sunk. I was just so sick by it," says Iwerks, reflecting on the legacy of the late Hanley Denning, a social worker profiled in "Recycled Life" Iwerks said "Recycled" is her most powerful film yet and she hopes it will keep opening doors for future projects about underdogs and cultures that seldom get in the limelight. She believes the contrast and conflict in the film were keys to winning her first Oscar nomination. If "Recycled" prevails in the February 25 awards, she will be the third generation in her family to win an Oscar. Her grandfather was Ub Iwerks, the Oscar-winning Disney animator who brought Mickey Mouse to life, and her father, Don Iwerks, won a lifetime Academy Award for his contribution to motion picture science and technology.

ITN Source | February 15, 2007

Tags:. .tragic. .trace. .gross. .recycling. .enduring