Garbage Dreams

Garbage Dreams

79 Minutes

There’s something subtly fascinating about the world of garbage: litter filled streets, processing plants, vast dumps where our waste joins together to form an identity of its own. Garbage Dreams capitalizes on this allure, finding its subject in Cairo, a city with no official sanitation system, and the professional scavengers who live on its margins.

A kind of strange lower class, the Zaballeen (Arabic for “garbage people”) are actually skilled workers with a careful eye for hands-on methods of recycling. They occupy their own remote quarter on the outskirts of the city, appearing in the pre-dawn hours to collect trash from people’s doorsteps. This trade, which makes them social misfits, also grants a cunning expertise, an inborn familiarity with waste that allows the recovery of 80 percent of what they collect. These materials are processed and sold.

By delving into the everyday lives of this subculture, Garbage Dreams becomes not only a group study but also a discourse on our relationship with garbage, specifically the sheer amount of trash a city produces.

The human element comes in the form of three boys, teenagers who’ve been brought up in what feels like a family business. They ply their trade the same as the adults, worry about money and talk about marriage, all while their livelihoods are increasingly threatened by foreign corporations, who pay the city for contracts and send in trucks to handle the waste themselves. The Zaballeen mock the clumsiness of these garbage men, who don’t understand the trash they’re handling or provide the doorstep service they offer. But it’s clear these are paltry arguments in the face of the kind of stark mechanical efficiency the trucks provide, defending a hands-on approach that feels hopelessly quaint.

This David and Goliath conflict gives the boys’ stories a tragic slant; even with their skills and a tight-knit community, the bleakness of their futures seems set. Saddest is Adham, a strange-looking kid who slacks off and misses work, unsuited for the trash business but with no other idea of what to do with himself. He talks about feelings of inadequacy, exhibiting the kind of complex that can develop from a lifetime of being looked down upon. When Adham leaves to join the community’s corporate rivals, enchanted by the lure of the uniform, it reads as a desperate plea for respect. The act of betrayal is laughed off by his friends, mostly ignored by his family, but it’s hard not to see the connection between his defection and the mindset of young men flocking to terrorism, their lives ruled by the same narrow borders and thirst for admiration.

The film has been hailed by environmental groups for its focus on sustainability, but this is only one aspect of the story director Mai Iskander is trying to tell. There is an environmental message here but not necessarily a positive one. Visiting a recycling facility in Wales, two of the boys despair its inefficiency, noting that only 20 percent of the material is salvaged. But Garbage Dreams focuses little on the ins and outs of this problem or the future of the Zaballeen. It’s far more attentive to the idea of how we deal with things for which we have no interest, whether it be waste or people like these young boys, nobodies who lives are lived entirely of view.

by Jesse Cataldo