Class Project: The Garbage Movie
1980 · 23m · Canada
Directed by Martin Defalco
Genres: documentary, essay film, family
Tones: contemplative, whimsical
Pupils aged eight to thirteen investigate garbage for a class project, visiting sites that reveal how waste connects to ecology, cities, art, and history.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A children's documentary about garbage sounds like the most aggressively boring assignment possible, which is exactly why Defalco turning it into something genuinely strange—where trash becomes a portal to ecology, cities, and history through eight-year-old eyes—actually works as subversion.
This sits in a precise lineage of pedagogical essay films and social documentaries, where Defalco's formal restraint and refusal to sentimentalize the children's inquiry elevates classroom material into something that argues for cinema's role in teaching us how to see.
The film's entire architecture hinges on treating the children's unscripted observations as epistemological material rather than cuteness—a single decision about where to point the camera that transforms a school project into genuine cinema.