SOLID WASTE
Sensory Ethnographic Film
Directed by JP King,
Produced by Sean Martindale
A visual contemplation of the waste stream
Solid Waste is a sensory ethnographic documentary film that goes behind the scenes at ten of Toronto's municipal waste management sites. Viewers are invited to visually follow their discards from curbside to landfill and contemplate their relationship with the hypnotic and hidden landscape of waste management.
Watch the full film here
About the Film
Positioned between artwork, sensory ethnography, and observational documentary, the film SOLID WASTE reveals the exotic underworld of the waste stream as it takes viewers behind the scenes at ten different City of Toronto waste management sites. Below and beyond normal reality, everything we throw away eventually joins a rubbish landscape comprised of familiar everyday objects that in their chance reshuffling begin to appear abstract, utterly strange, and yet somehow beautiful.
Haunting, dark, dense, and mysterious, SOLID WASTE is ultimately a mortality tale in which we watch inanimate things, never fully alive, finally, come to die. In this immersive, grinding, highly sensorial, and contemplative documentary, the audience directly confronts the accumulated effects of individual consumer behaviour, acknowledging that everything must go somewhere when there is no “away”.
