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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Oscar Nominated Short Doc: RECYCLED LIFE

Spotlight on Oscar Nominated Short Doc
RECYCLED LIFE
Director: Leslie Iwerks
Producer: Mike Glad
Running Time: 38 minutes.
From Reuters via TV Guide:
http://www.tvguide.com/News-Views/Entertainment-News/Article/Default.aspx?idx=126194:
Watch for RECYCLED LIFE, the short documentary that Leslie Iwerks made with producer Mike Glad at the Academy Awards on Feb. 23 — it’s one of the finer socially concerned nonfiction films you’ll see this year. The director’s surname, Iwerks, is familiar to film buffs, but I don’t think we’ll see her– or her Oscar nominated documentary — get much airtime on Entertainment Tonight: her movie’s concerned with trash and death, and lacks celebrities and easy uplifting endings.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Director Leslie Iwerks doubts any of her fellow Oscar nominees had spiders in their trousers while filming, nor would they find dead babies, animal carcasses, bubbling gases and an unbearable stench on location.
But that was the reality of working in Central America’s largest garbage dump for four years to make “Recycled Life,” nominated for best documentary short.
The dump in Guatemala City is a giant crater where thousands, including children, eke out a living by recycling garbage and foraging for food. Whole families have subsisted on the dump, generation after generation, for the last 60 years.

One of the people featured in the film, Hanley Danning, died January 18 in an automobile accident in Guatemala City. (An obituary runs today in the Boston Globe.) Danning, a native of Yarmouth, Maine and a 1992 graduate of Bowdoin College, visited Guatemala in 1997 to learn Spanish. She decided to stay on to help those scavenging for food in the Guatemala City dump.
If RECYCLED LIFE wins the Oscar in its category, Iwerks will be the third generation in her family to win an Academy Award. Her grandfather was Oscar-winning animator Ub Iwerks (credited with bringing Mickey Mouse to life in the Disney cartoons), and her father, Don Iwerks, won a lifetime Academy Award for his contribution to motion picture science and technology.
“Iwerks has made a posthumous tribute to Denning and put it on the DVD along with the 38-minute documentary. A portion of the proceeds with go to Denning’s organization, Safe Passage (safepassage.org).”


Reuters via TV Guide
http://www.tvguide.com/News-Views/Entertainment-News/Article/Default.aspx?idx=126194
RECYCLED LIFE
Film website: www.recycledlifedoc.org
For more information on the school that Denning helped found, visit www.safepassage.org.
Thanks to Denning’s alma mater, Bowdoin College and its student-run newspaper, The Orient, for links and information.

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4 Responses to “Oscar Nominated Short Doc: RECYCLED LIFE”

  1. Sharon Maetschke says:

    I know the stench you are speaking about. I have worked serving meals to families in the garbage dump in Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco Mexico and in a school set up next to the dump for children to try to break the cycle you refer to of the generations of families that have known nothing but working at the dump to get whatever food they could and goods for recycling. I wish your film would have won an award. I will investigate further to try to find a way to look at your documentary. Congratulations on your nomination.
    Peace & Blessings,
    Sharon Maetschke

  2. Sharon Maetschke says:

    I know the stench you are speaking about. I have worked serving meals to families in the garbage dump in Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco Mexico and in a school set up next to the dump for children to try to break the cycle you refer to of the generations of families that have known nothing but working at the dump to get whatever food they could and goods for recycling. I wish your film would have won an award. I will investigate further to try to find a way to look at your documentary. Congratulations on your nomination.
    Peace & Blessings,
    Sharon Maetschke

  3. lauren peery says:

    how can i get ahold of this documentary to watch it?? i am very interested.

  4. Barbara Garman says:

    How can I view this film?
    Barbara Garman

Quote Unquotesee all »

It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon