Plastic China

A must see.

To watch these families 'exist' in their world - especially the eldest daughter - is hard to watch, but this is a must see film, just to see how the 'other half' lives.

We live our lives, using things and throwing them away. These people are on the exact opposite of our actions.

Tough to see.

The pacing was perfect I thought.

This very interesting documentary shows the life of two Chinese families three generations deep living on, beside and surrounded by plastic waste. Their job is to turn the plastic into pellets to be sold to industry.

It's a Chinese language film with English subtitles. The focus is on 11-year-old Yi Jie, daughter of Pen who works for "boss man" Kun who has come in from the country where he was a farmer to recycle plastic waste so he can afford to pay for education for his children (and no so incidentally) buy nice things like a new car. We see the children at work and play among and amidst the piles of mostly white plastic. We see the workers and children sort through the plastic for the right kind to feed the machine that makes pellets that can be sold. The children play, the families eat together, they sing, they joke, they moan about making the equivalent of five dollars a day. They dream, and strange to say learn a lot about the world by examining and reading the plastic trash from all over the world.

I learned a bit about plastic recycling some twenty years ago when for two months I walked the streets of the beach cities in the Los Angeles area collecting bottles and cans. I found out then that the plastic that was not deposit bottles was gathered into great shipping crates and sold to China. In turn many American companies bought the resulting pellets from China! This film shows why it was economic to ship the plastic waste to China and then effectively speaking buy back a value-added product. Quite simply the labor costs were and are so much less.

Curiously this is an uplifting doc with almost no political message. Because the people are shown going about their daily lives we come to feel we know them, and indeed their hopes and dreams and the way they live with one another is very much like people everywhere.

Director Jiuliang Wang demonstrates in this film that he has a fine eye for the right kind of detail and a good sense of people and even how to tell a story, because, yes this is a story, a true one about people living in poverty but filled with hope. Wang is also the director of "Beijing Besieged by Waste" (2012) which I haven't seen yet.

--Dennis Littrell, author of "The World Is Not as We Think It Is"

It would make a good 30 minute doc but what he has here is repetitive. It's a sad, interesting story but by the 30 minute mark you get the tragedy, the hopelessness. how long can you watch people sort and refine plastic? I would not recommend this doc. It was torture to watch in many ways.

Yeah, it's a documentary, but it says more about us as humans. It's more of an artistic exposition of what we are becoming. And with the utmost respect for the humans here, we need to be better at it. Save the earth and we save ourselves.

This documentary did a really great job at making contrasts between modernity and agricultural life. A dreamlike product in the developed countries becomes wasted and is shipped to a former small agricultural village in China. People there wanted to thrive someday by decomposing the wastes. The packages and publications from the waste make them dream. Kids made themselves capes , computers and auto shows, and the "boss" wanted to buy a dream car in the future. The poison we considered in the cities becomes their bed for sweet dream.

It is beyond my imagination and keeps me rethink the recycling industry because it can transfer the damage to other countries to recycle and claim that the product is environmentally friendly without seeing the actual recycle process. But at the same time it is also an industry depend on wastes and it is on which people live. This documentary really raised a dilemma: How could we make the protagonists' life better? Should we cut down this kind of industry? However as the Kun said:" I don't have other skills. I do it for living." then, should we produce more wastes? Do they have to live like this?