Reviewed by Elliot V. Kotek
(from Cinequest 2010)

Directed by: John Sheedy
Starring: Pedro, Jose, David, Reyna, Elvira and David Lynch

Whereas festival films about “garbage people” by Enji Wassef (“Zaballeen”) and Mai Iskander (“Garbage Dreams”) look at communities in Egypt, John Sheedy traveled to Tijuana, Mexico, to show us the issue is alive much closer to home.

What stands out in each of these documentaries is an obvious dichotomy of spirit. The viewer watches the film with an innate sense of pity, sympathy or disdain for the communities who live amidst the waste, but the world of these families, though depressed, is not entirely depressing.

The children have a sense of play no matter their socio-economic status. And, without any knowledge or realization of the relative disparity of their living conditions, they cannot be truly mindful of the status we place on their situation. That element is an old one. It’s the difference between ignorance and understanding, and leads to all sorts of maladjustments, including war.

Tijuana, generally, is represented in the media as a conduit through which dreams are sought, a town of transients present only for the proximity to the United States and in hopes of a border crossing to something better.

“The Tijuana Project,” while indeed introducing Tijuana as a territory rife with shootouts and kidnappings in which no children should have to find their status quo, focuses in on the Manzo, Hernandez and Ramirez families whose foundations have been built in a municipal garbage dump zone and who prefer the more financially rewarding work of harvesting recyclable materials from a scrap heap (up to $20 a day) to the $70-a-week menial jobs available in the factory and shopping malls.

The filmmakers estimate that 15 million people in the world live in dumps. And where this documentary feels short on content is in its fleeting suggestion that there is an inordinate amount of waste created by the world and questioning whether these communities of people living amidst the garbage is diminishing or becoming more lucrative as a result of the focus on environmental recycling in recent years. The film also missed an opportunity to talk to other communities within the country to gauge their perception of this reality.

The still photographs taken for this documentary, of the violence and of the views, are powerfully pretty. Fausto Gonzalez, a shanty town of trash in a municipal garbage zone, is revealed as a burning pit where respiratory illnesses and skin rashes are rife; where drugs and alcohol are prevalent; and where addicts make their homes in a cemetery’s tombs and crypts, melting found copper on overturned tombstones.

The doc isn’t all doom and gloom. Hope has been born out of the efforts of David Lynch, a teacher who has dedicated himself to the area for almost thirty years and whose schools now educate more then 400 children, giving them “a key to open the door to leaving a life of poverty.” I look forward to updates from the filmmakers as to where graduates of these programs have managed to make lives for themselves and whether they’re able to bring their families, too, out of the rubble.

Photo courtesy Cinequest