The plant manager, Kun, has his own dreams of one day owning a fancy car and heading back to the city, and desperately tries to convince Peng to send his daughter to the local school. What will the U.S. election do to hate in Canada? It is imperative that we completely eliminate unnecessary plastics, and that can only be achieved by radically changing our habits and becoming conscious of the environment with everything we do and everything we buy. Terms of Use |

About Our Ads As research on plastic and its detriments on the environment increasingly pop up on our news feeds, it’s obvious that we’ve reached a breaking point. Sales: CNEX, Beijing (contact@cnex.org.cn) But Peng has no money, and anyway, Yi-Jie has to take care of her younger siblings and contribute to the recycling work. And so he set off to the rural region… where he encountered a lot of resistance from those involved in the remedial waste management industry. A magazine advertisement for the Sandals Resorts looks like paradise; catalogs with computer parts offer up opportunities to build paper versions of electronics she could never afford. | Cookie Settings, Courtesy of International Documentary Festival Amsterdam. The photographer-turned-director’s debut documentary, 2011’s Beijing Besieged by Waste, discovered the city-sized hills of garbage trucked to the outskirts of the Chinese capital, where displaced families lived in houses made of trash. Image from 'Plastic China' documentary website. A peer into the minute workings of the world's second-largest economy, Jiuliang Wang's Plastic China is much more "micro" than its "macro" title suggests.

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Where Wang achieves sentimentality and awareness at displaying his subjects’ somber existence, he fails in giving his audience any objective information about the health, social, or environmental impacts of the Chinese recycling process. Next up: A new doc called Plastic China, ... After six months of getting to know two families who worked at one small plant, Wang was allowed intimate access to their lives. Wang’s camera catches heartbreaking images of Jie, the preteen with a collapsing weight of responsibility on her young shoulders. There is one obvious, clear, imperative measure that we all must make a priority- we must reduce the amount of plastics we use every day. By this point, the dark irony of Wang's title has become apparent, the "plasticity" of Chinese society only applicable to those at the very top of the vast, precarious pile. Then the country stopped buying almost all our recyclables. Instead of numbing us with facts like how China has contaminated over 80 per cent of its fresh water through landfills and processing, he gets us to feel bad for Kun, Peng and their kids; if we identified with their plight, perhaps we wouldn’t want to send so much trash for them to sort through.

But where do these taxes go if not on public education? He later visits a gaudy Beijing car show where his eye is caught by a model costing the equivalent of $11,500 — this Western-style luxury is in stark contrast to Peng's reported wages of $6.50 a day. your subscription today. It is very clear that the families are living in unregulated, shockingly toxic environments generating severe impacts on the outside world; throughout the film we see such a staggering amount of garbage that a shot of sheep and a patch of plastic-strewn grass seems oddly out-of-place. Wang, however, is in the business of observation rather than investigation or explanation, giving Kun and Peng equal screen time to verbalize their discontents. Please help us make our goal! In 2017, they stopped. Maybe we would care about the health of those living at the bottom of the social ladder if we were a part their lives for 90 minutes. Plastic China focuses on materially ambitious factory-owner Kun, his employee Peng, and their families. Director Jiu-liang Wang is one of the few documentary filmmakers in China to have taken on the government and won. Director-screenwriter-cinematographer: Jiuliang Wang

The version shown at Sundance now features a different soundtrack, composed by Tyler Strickland. The picture that takes shape here is of a 21st-century economy that functions as a self-perpetuating trap for those unlucky enough to find themselves within its toils.

The whenever is ambiguous, as his 11-year-old daughter Yi Jie tells the camera that he’s been promising to send her to school since she was five. Neil Young

TWITTER Apart from this sappy scoring*, Plastic China is on the whole an engagingly straightforward affair. The low grade plastics normally sent to China consisted of plastic bags, food labels, coffee cups and more- all products that are normally used once before being tossed away. Concentrating on one boss, one worker and the worker's preteen daughter — who spends more time laboring than schooling — it's an empathetic, intimate, quietly moving story of wealth inequalities. Climate.

Here’s how the outcome of the U.S. election could impact Canada.

With China saying no to plastic waste, the world needs a new plan "This is a wake-up call," a University of Georgia researcher said, highlighting the need for new ideas on how to handle plastic trash.

The policy shift was partly attributed to the impact of a documentary, Plastic China, which went viral before censors erased it from China’s internet. Ontario. Experts warn of an increase in illegal dumping and incineration of plastics as prices for plastic scraps plummet in the wake of China’s exit from the market it dominated. The country’s populist leader, Premier Wen Jiabao, had the illegal ring of refuse sites investigated and then cleaned up, which was at once a major victory and just the beginning of Wang’s dive into the dirty downside to China’s capitalist surge. by

Hsiao-Hung Pai went to Fujian province to talk to some of them Something doesn't add up here.

Trailer for 'Plastic China' film by director Wang Jiuliang. “And I was carrying a camera, so it was especially tough at the beginning. There are over 5,000 little unregulated recycling plants in the town alone, giving Wang plenty of subject options. A deliberate shift in consumption will not happen overnight.

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The success of the first film got Wang invited to California, where he toured recycling plants as part of his next round of research.

You need an active subscription to post a comment. After six months of getting to know two families who worked at one small plant, Wang was allowed intimate access to their lives. Wang's inquisitive cameras compile a grim reportage of what looks like an unwholesome, even toxic environment for workers, bosses and pint-sized residents alike.

The daughter of a young plastic factory worker, Yi Jie, looks over a heap of plastic while cradling her baby sibling. Privacy | The Beijing section also includes a trip to the Great Helmsman's mausoleum, where communist slogans now carry a decidedly incongruous air: "All the people will have a well-off life!" This ambitious plan requires the full participation of producers to consumers and is an inspirational idea, though I hadn’t even heard of it before digging through plastic research, and it doesn’t seem to be very widely discussed. Plastic China focuses on materially ambitious factory-owner Kun, his employee Peng, and their families.

Up to 60 per cent of Quebec’s plastics went to China before its ban; Halifax is reportedly sending three hundred tonnes of plastic to landfill, and Calgary is sitting on five thousand tonnes of plastic waste, with all of that having gone to China in the past. She picks out broken Barbie dolls and passes over Western product labels, a seemingly deliberate shot for Wang to remind viewers of the vastly different worlds between the kids who tossed those toys away and the ones on the other side of the world who pick them out of the trash to play with.