Can art be a vehicle for social change? Can it change individual lives? Is offering poor people who are ignored or regarded as bottom-feeders an opportunity to achieve recognition and fame an honorable way to provide them with the respect that they have been denied for their entire lives? Is it a chance to empower them by offering them a different way of thinking about the world? Or is it a way to dangle false hope in front of them and make them more acutely aware of their limited options? Also, how much real difference is there between a respected arthouse documentary about offering poor people a chance to experience fame and possibly better their lives, and a disrespected reality television show that does essentially the same thing?
The documentary Waste Land (2010) observes Brazilian-born, Brooklyn-based artist Vik Muniz as he visits the massive Jardim Gramacho landfill, which serves the Rio de Janeiro metropolitan area, and collaborates with some of the catadores (people who pick recyclable materials from the landfill) to create works of art to be displayed internationally and auctioned for charity. The film doesn't explore all of the previously mentioned questions in depth, but Muniz and filmmaker Lucy Walker are sufficiently self-aware to acknowledge some of the ethical issues raised by this philanthropic project. Perhaps that is the difference between this documentary and the hypothetical reality show that I mentioned.
Waste Land provides some of the catadores with the opportunity to tell their individual stories, and this is the emotional center of the film, in my opinion. I don't know if the opportunity to talk about their lives on camera had any effect on how the catadores viewed themselves, but it did affect how I saw them. For example, I learned that many of them chose to pick recyclable materials so they wouldn't have to resort to dealing drugs or prostitution to support themselves. The catadores emerged as real, three-dimensional people instead of being part of an undifferentiated mass of laborers who nearly blended into the garbage itself. Indeed, this seems to be the message of this film: that some of the things we regard as disposable, including human beings themselves, have real value.