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'Landfill Harmonic' screens thanks to Global Peace Film Festival this week
“The world sends us garbage. We send back music,” says Favio Chavez, music director of the Recycled Orchestra of Cateura, in
Landfill Harmonic.
Cateura is an enormous landfill dump sited in the capital of Paraguay, Asuncíon, and the orchestra consists of the slum-dwellers who live and work there. They play instruments made entirely out of garbage: a cello built from an oil canister, a drum with a head made from a cast-off X-ray.
The Global Peace Film Festival is sponsoring this screening of the 2015 documentary at the Plaza Live, home of the Orlando Philharmonic — whose instruments are made of ebony and rosewood, not tin cans and spatulas, but whose love of their craft is no greater than the young members of the Recycled Orchestra.
This documentary pulls out all the stops to tug viewers’ heartstrings; if there’s any failing, it’s that it glosses over the political and socioeconomic structures at play in South America and the motivations of the adults in charge of the group in order to bask in the “transformative power of music and the resilience of the human spirit” vibes. But said vibes are undeniable, and we could all use a little loverade these days.
6 p.m., Thursday, March 23, Plaza Live, 425 N. Bumby Ave., free but RSVP required, eventbrite.com.
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