/ARTS WEEKLY/FILM-BRAZIL: The Poetic Madness of a Garbage Dump Dweller

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Aug 2 2005 (IPS) - "I’m an outcast, but I won’t change the way I am, I won’t give in. I’m Estamira, and that’s that."

Estamira, the subject of a documentary of the same name, is a Brazilian woman now in her 60s who has spent the last 20 years living and working in a sprawling open-air garbage dump on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro.

She is also a clinically diagnosed schizophrenic, who describes herself as "crazy, out of my mind, but conscious and lucid."

Estamira has carved out a role as a "community leader" among the garbage pickers who eke out an existence, scavenging for food and recyclable materials like tin cans, paper and glass, at Jardin Gramacho, an open dumpsite recently converted into a sanitary landfill, where much of the solid waste from this city of over 10 million people ends up.

While depicting the horrific conditions in which these people live, the documentary is most striking for the often surprisingly poetic and insightful observations of its central character.

Directed by Marcos Prado, Estamira was selected as the best full-length feature film at the 7th International Festival of Environmental Cinema (FICA), held in early July in the central Brazilian city of Goiás, some 340 km from the country’s capital, Brasilia.

Completed in 2004, the film had already garnered numerous awards at other festivals in Brazil, as well as in France, the United States and the Czech Republic.

Yet despite this recognition, Estamira has yet to be released commercially or aired on television in Brazil, as has recently been the case with a number of other Brazilian documentaries, noted André Trigueiro, an environmental journalist who headed up this year’s FICA jury.

Prado is a photographer and film producer who spent several years documenting the evolution of the Jardin Gramacho garbage dump, through pictures that were eventually published in a book of the same name.

Five years ago, while photographing the residents of the landfill, he came across Estamira, and was so taken by the outspoken, charismatic old woman that he decided to make a movie about her.

After filming Estamira over the course of four years, Prado ended up with 120 hours of movie and video footage, which he cut down to a 100-minute documentary.

Alternating between black and white and colour footage, the film serves primarily as a showcase for Estamira’s vocal philosophising, and poignantly reflects the progressive deterioration wrought over the course of four years as the symptoms of her schizophrenia grow more acute.

One of the most shocking scenes comes near the end of the film, depicting a violent blow-out between Estamira and her son, a devout evangelical Christian. His attempts to preach the gospel to his elderly mother merely serve to unleash a loud and furious stream of insults and expletives.

Interviews with three of Estamira’s grown children help to provide insight into her life story. She was raised by a violent father and a mother who also suffered from some undefined form of mental illness, and has had at least two husbands.

Her lifelong remorse over committing her own mother to a psychiatric institution has kept Estamira’s children from condemning her to the same fate.

For the last 20 years, she has alternated between living for two or three weeks at a time at the garbage dump, sleeping out in the open air, and returning for a few days to her shack in a faraway neighbourhood, where her children visit her.

Estamira attributes her own mental illness to the fact that "my mind works a lot," and claims at one point that she has a "comet" in her head.

While she professes to hate God, who "only talks about wars and the suffering of Jesus," she believes in the existence of a higher power she describes as a "natural remote control."

She also shares her views of "the afterlife beyond the afterlife," and declares that death is nothing more than a process of "disincarnation," when individuals take on a "transparent, invisible form."

"My mission," she proclaims, "is to reveal the truth and expose lies."

"I am everyone’s vision," she adds. "No one can live without me."

In what she views as a world full of "hypocritical, shameless and insignificant" people, the "earth is defenceless."

"The only solution is to burn everything down," she concludes.