So the Reel Waste Festival, in a city that’s become pretty good at waste management, is a timely collection of films that should serve as, if not a call to action, at least a “can’t say we didn’t show you.”
 

Exporting Harm (Tue, 7pm; VVVV), produced by the Basel Action Network, opens our eyes to the fate of our computers: 100 000 people in the Chinese town of Guiyu de-soldering circuit boards, stripping acid, melting plastic, burning wires, cracking open cathode ray tubes. The unbelievably dangerous “underbelly of our consumptive cyber-age lifestyle” is shocking, but our lethal outsourcing of responsibility to the unaware, unprotected poor in Asia can be prevented. Just a glimpse of electronics-piled ditches and e-sludge rivers should be enough to make us, as consumers, spend just a little more time investigating the toxicity of the new laptop we buy and ask a few questions about what will happen to that old monitor we’re getting rid of. We can also demand that Europe’s Basel Convention concerning the export of techno-trash be strictly adhered to (the US has refused to ratify it). Contact info for two engaged groups is also offered.
 

Leslie Iwerks’ Recycling Life (Wed, 7pm; VVVV), marred by narrator Edward James Olmos’ overly dramatic, CNN-announcer-style voice, is an otherwise deeply affecting look at the recent history of workers in Guatemala City’s 40-acre ravine of trash. These guajeros—Victorian England’s dustmen of the 21st century, many of whom have been living in the dump for generations—sift, sort and recycle others’ excess, our guide Charlie even rescuing a cat someone had thrown away to die. But the dump is also home to abandoned children, glue-sniffers and toxic gases. Warning against the pointlessness of pity or horror, this clear-eyed look at the messiness of the garbage warriors’ plight ends on a mostly happy note, where near-disaster forces the government to finally clean up the situation. 
 

T-Shirt Travels (Tue, 7pm; VVV) tracks the largest exported product from the US to Africa—used clothing. Dealers buy bales from the Salvation Army and elsewhere, then mark them up and ship them off to countries like Zambia, where Luka buys a bale, buses it 10 hours from the capital to the market stall he’s rented, and sells what clothes he can, trading the rest for fish. And so a generic, commercial American way of life is not just modeled on TV but on African bodies, adults and children wearing Bart Simpson, Michael Bolton or 1994 Detroit Pistons NBA Champions T-shirts.
 

Writer-director-producer Shantha Bloemen stitches her T-shirt travelogue into a film-essay about Third World debt: African lands suffered slavery and resource-stripping at the hands of colonial powers, then, post-independence, were impoverished into reliance on the IMF and World Bank. A new economic colonialism kicks in: debt payments, megaprojects imposed by Western financial managers, markets opened up only to be swamped by cheaper, subsidized foreign goods (such as T-shirts) and government-run companies turned over to private investors, who strip assets and lay off workers, many resorting to hand-to-mouth businesses (like selling T-shirts).

 

This story has been told even more powerfully by a film made a year earlier, Stephanie Black’s Life + Debt. And near the end, T-Shirt Travels stumbles a little on that fine line between seeing Africans as “caught in a trap” they didn’t “create or control” and seeing Africans as helpless. It’s Luka and his family’s resilience and persistent struggle that makes the documentary so resounding a rebuttal to the West’s insistence on seeing Africa as second-rate by making it a second-hand dumping-ground. But what of possible solutions: rejigging the clothing export system? Some kind of direct, person-to-person aid? Microcredit for sellers like Luka so individuals can pay back small debts, rather than suffering for their country’s mountainous ones? And what about erasing those debts already?
 

Solutions aren’t in short supply in Oliver Hodge’s Garbage Warrior (Tue, 9pm; VVVVV), a jewel of a documentary, three years in the making, not just because it’s beyond hopeful to the point of down-right enervating, but because of its subject—Mike Reynolds, an architect of self-sustainable housing. Reynolds looks like a long-retired ’60s rocker but, like his crew, he’s a driven, passionate, fascinatingly down-to-earth soul. Convinced of humanity’s slow self-destruction, Reynolds believes we can do better than survive, perhaps even enhance the planet. In New Mexico, once known for its annihilating nuclear test, Reynolds is a creator, building dozens of homes (some called “earthships”) out of recyclables and reusables: dirt-packed tires (for heating and insulation), beercans or bottles (as bricks), and glass (for solar heating). The toughest battle for this feisty, fulminating greybeard is wading through the garbage of state bureaucracy in order to fight subdivision laws and pass a bill that approves of his trial-and-error test buildings. North America’s tottering, top-down political structure (“American politics is a fuckin’ dinosaur that’s not gonna make it”) only makes Reynold’s and his crew’s grassroots, cooperative work with the people of the Andamans all the more inspirational—in 2005, they went to the tsunami-ravaged islands to build simple, self-sustainable housing with the people there, and what they accomplish is a model of organic, independent, off-the-grid living. Garbage Warrior is a brilliantly constructed film about a larger-than-life, passionate visionary who shows that simple change isn’t just urgent, but blindly obvious and well within reach. All we have to do is take a second-hand look at what we’re dumping out our back doors. V