From The Dumps

When Beijing was hit with its heaviest rainfall in 60 years in late July, the resultant tragedy — 77 people dying due to inadequate drainage — highlighted the infrastructure problems dogging the world's most sprawling, misthought megalopolis. Since the construction of the Grand Canal in the fifth century BC, Beijing's imported its resources. With its unchecked recent growth, the resources it imports and disposes of are staggering. With China these days effectively serving as the world's factory, its capital is, in turn, a cluttered, polluted, toxic megacity and, in turn, a towering symbol of humanity squeezing ever harder on an overtaxed planet.

Beijing Besieged By Waste captures this, the film a series of landscapes set amongst the illegal dumps and monolithic landfills that encircle Beijing, butting up against the ever-expanding city. “In 2008, I was in my hometown, a village in Shandong province, shooting a photographic series about ghost and gods,” explains Wang Jiuling, the 36-year-old photographer-turned-documentarian behind it. “I needed to find very pristine countryside to be the background of this photographic series. However, it was really hard to find that environment; in China, this pure environment that was around even a generation ago is now totally gone.”

So, Wang threw himself into a world whose horrors are daily life for the denizens who pick through refuse for work or sustenance. “The smell of the rubbish made it really hard to breathe,” he recounts. “Big clouds of flies would surround me like crazy dogs and stay on my face. It was really hard to get rid of them. When I stood on the rubbish piles, the soft, slippery feeling made me afraid I would sink in.”

Chased away by landfill owners and under pressure from government departments, Beijing Besieged By Waste was made as underground work, and is now the key film in the Melbourne International Film Festival's inspired program Street Level Visions: Chinese Independent Documentaries. Yet, with its study of rampant hyper-capitalism and debilitating energy consumption, it's a film of global resonance.

“When I looked closely at the rubbish in these dumps, I saw all kind of logos. The landfills look like a combination of all kinds of well-known global brands. The rubbish is totally symbolic of modern capitalist production and consumerist culture.”

Though there's a fatalism underlying the portrayal, Wang also undertook Beijing Besieged By Waste with a sense of hope, his project a social crusade. “I cared more about the social value generated by the work,” he explains. “I cared more about whether the waste problem could be improved as a result of this film.”

With Beijing Besieged By Waste being screened both domestically and internationally, it indeed brought the issue into public focus, and the local government has had to bring in new policies, invest money and enforce dumping laws to curb the problem. Wang is proud: “I can confidently say all of those 500 landfills I shot around Beijing have improved.” But he also knows, ultimately, the issue is a no-win proposition. No technology can truly dispose of waste, meaning the issue should be of limiting the production of it. “However,” he sighs, “the mass production of products under capital and consumer culture has spread all around the world, speeding the rush towards imminent environmental collapse.”

Thanks to Wang Yi for translation assistance.

Beijing Besieged By Waste (Part of MIFF) screens on Friday 10 August 9pm & Sunday 12 August 6.30pm.