Surfing the Waste: A Musical Documentary about Dumpster Diving Paul Aflalo, Sandra Lombardi

After the animated environmental film, here comes the first musical environmental documentary! Forget boring and traditional ways to talk about our ecological footprint, forget Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth or Leonardo DiCaprio in 11th Hour. Finally ordinary people are showing us - in a light-hearted way - how they have found ways to live more ethically on this planet.

Liz, Mike, Allison, Owain and Alden are five youngsters living in Montreal. They dance, sing and play in this upbeat short film which tells about “dumpster diving”. It may sound like a sport, but it’s actually a way of life. They are a kind of current human Wall-e: the principle is to reuse as much as possible, mainly finding what they need from other people’s garbage.

Filming their houses and everyday routines, they express how to become aware as consumers of how much we buy and throw away, or even how not to consume at all, singing “We are remedying wastefulness by taking trash home”.

Perhaps you can follow them with the karaoke, and tomorrow who knows, you may even find your new sofa on the street.

Silvia Taborelli