Thursday, February 18, 2016

When Wasted Lands Became Treasured Lands

I am super excited about the material for this weeks post! I just watched Waste Land. The movie is a documentary about Vik Muniz who is from Brazil and now resides in Brooklyn, New York. Vik, like most other Brazilians, grew up in the streets of ghetto Brazil. Because of an unfortunate event-- being in the right place at the wrong time-- he was shot on accident by a rich man that paid him off. With that money Vik traveled to the United States and became a world renowned photographer. 

His mission in the movie Waste Land is to take pictures of trash "pickers" in the world's largest dump just outside of Rio de Janeiro-- Jardim Gramacho. With these pictures, the pickers and he made collages out of the trash that they picked, took pictures of the trash collages and sold them in a London art auction. 100% of the proceeds went to these pickers. The 50,000 dollars that one of the pictures sold for meant almost nothing to Vik Muniz who has made his fortune BUT to the pickers, it changed their lives!

I am motivated by what I watched. My goal is to make it big in the world, so that I can build others. There is not enough generosity in the world-- too much greed. I want to change that and believe I can. Vik did. 

#eliminatepoverty

Waste Land. Dir. Lucy Walker. Perf. Vik Muniz. 02 Filmes, 2010. Netflix.
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1 comment:

  1. UnknownFebruary 19, 2016 at 12:42 PM

    I also think it was great to see how Muniz changed the lives of the people. However, I think it is important to recognize that Muniz didn’t solve all of the people’s problem or eliminate poverty. Although, he did help as much as he could and improved the life of a few people. One person can’t fix the world’s problem and realistically a whole bunch a people are not going to solve all of the world’s problem either. They can,however, make the lives of individuals better , and that is what matters. As the man in the documentary said, “99 is not 100”.

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