This is a stunning film. A visually rich report on the costs of development that is effective because Edward Burtynsky’s photographs, which serve as the focus of this documentary by Jennifer Baichwal, reveal that industry can be as monumental and awe-inspiring as the Grand Canyon. In fact, the point of the movie is to show that there is no Grand Canyon left any more, and, what you have instead, when you go to a place like China, are giant mountains of discarded computer terminals sent back as waste from the rest of the world. It is not an unending herd of running antelope that stretches to the horizon–it is workers in bright uniforms leaving the endless rows of worktables. (And, in minutes, all are gone except for one who has fallen asleep out of exhaustion.) Edward Burtynsky is an amazing photographer, and, a couple of times, he speaks of epiphanies that made him connect his own habits of consumption with what he saw as a worldwide depredation of natural resources and even human exploitation; but the film-makers don’t ever attempt to go beyond Burtynsky’s own words and images, and we might sometimes be in danger of being mesmerized by the images, and even invest in a mythology of Chinese industry. Who is out there documenting the wasteful consumerism in the West which has altered forever the natural and human geography of the world?
Watch the film’s trailer here.