Hacker CinemaGarbage Dreams
Garbage Dreams
2009 · Film · documentary · 79 min
Directed by Mai Iskander
GARBAGE DREAMS follows three teenage boys born into the trash trade and growing up in the world's largest garbage village. It is the home to 60,000 Zaballeen, Egypt's 'garbage people.' When their community is suddenly faced with the globalization of their trade, each boy is forced to make choices that will impact his life and the future of his community.
1 positivefrom 1 commenter
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
1 comment on Hacker News
In Egypt, specifically Cairo, it is more complicated than that. There is an entire pre-modern recycling system where a sizable group of the Christian minority who are lower class or below the poverty line live in neighborhood known as Muqattam (or to Egyptians, Mu'attam مقطم). They take piles of garbage, feed garbage to the pigs, and sort anything, and I mean anything, recyclable for reuse and for profit selling it off.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mokattam
Also notes there is a church of stunning beauty inside this community. Almost all hipster study abroads, yours truly included, visit this once in their time in Egypt.
samaanchurch.com/en/miracle_en.php
They are frequently the focus of Western NGO work, specifically the children, and at one time a documentary and NGO project was initiated to teach them modern recycling techniques to implement abroad.
http://garbagedreams.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_Dreams
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_Dreams
And a general note. And I do mean, general, not just to brc. I see a lot of comments, and I still, as an American of an overly privileged upbringing, that people have trouble with their cultural lense. It is incredibly easy to see "there's always a lot of rubbish sitting around, and also a lot of people sitting around," when in fact the situation is more complicated. These people have been doing recycling in a very dangerous way (to their health) and making a meager living long before such practices, in more sanitary ways, took off in the West.
From Egypt, I still miss the smell of burning garbage, as awful as it sounds, when I ride the ring road between a major suburb to downtown Cairo to get to school. It creates strong nostalgia in me, so I had to say something, as unrelated as this comment is.