Tag: Lucy Walker

The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom

The Japanese word “sakura” refers to the blooming of Japan’s cherry blossoms in the spring, but it literally translates to “beautiful, but not showy.”

The documentary short “The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom” is steeped in artistic beauty, but it feels just right in capturing the mood between tragedy and hopeful optimism for the future.

Lucy Walker’s Oscar nominated short documents the tsunami that hit Japan on March 11, 2011. The opening sequence is a cell phone video of the destruction in near real time. It all happens so quickly, but as we see it unfurl, it seems to be gradually happening as though time has slowed to a sickening crawl. It’s a powerful sensation. Continue reading “The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom”

Waste Land

Modern artist Vik Muniz describes art as a thing of transformation, the ability to take something ugly or plain and mold it into something beautiful or socially poignant.

In its humble beginnings just profiling Muniz, the documentary “Waste Land” goes through such a transformation when it travels to Rio de Janiero and finds a thriving, happy and environmentally crucial community of garbage pickers in the world’s largest landfill.

Following the norm of many of the best documentaries ever made, “Waste Land” completely changes focuses mid-filming when Muniz sets out to make a difference at Jardim Gramacho, the largest landfill on the planet, and does not discover a city of drug addict, wastoid scavengers but a group of intellectuals who have established a comfortable living for themselves. Continue reading “Waste Land”