Film Opening

  For our film opening, Christina and I wanted to do an opening to a film that correlated to our documentary. We wanted to incorporate that same theme of simplicity and creativity. Before we came up with our idea, I asked Christina to think of games or toys she used to play with when she was little. I asked myself the same thing. I recalled of one memory in particular. When I was four years old, I had recently moved to the United States from Colombia. We lived in a small apartment with inflatable mattresses as our beds and boxes as our toys. My brother and I would construct spaceships and race-cars and castles with these boxes. We would sometimes jump into the dumpster and grab pots and pans that people had thrown away and played house with our neighbors. This very idea of creating something out of nothing inspired us to construct a similar story for our film opening.

 We also conducted research and stumbled upon a famous Brazilian artist and photographer Vik Muniz, What was so interesting about his artwork, is that he constructs murals out of garbage. Yes, garbage. He collects just about anything that people want to throw out or give away and he recreates a photograph of his own with garbage. He also works with chocolate, peanut butter, and other foods to recreate these famous paintings such as the Mona Lisa. He was the perfect example of an artist who made a living from scraps of garbage.

 Our film opening is about a young boy with a vivid imagination who lives in a poor neighborhood in New York. With no toys and no education, he looks for different ways to entertain himself using the elements around him. Inevitably, he begins to use trash from the dumpsters to recreate an image.