One Man's Trash
2019 · 3m · USA
Directed by Alex Craig, Aaron Craig
Genres: documentary, experimental
Tones: contemplative, theatrical, whimsical
A Brooklyn performance artist builds 170-pound Transformer costumes entirely from salvaged trash and parades them through the streets.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a doc about a guy making giant robots from garbage in Brooklyn—which sounds like five other art-world films—but the Craigs refuse to let it become precious or self-conscious, and that restraint is what keeps it from collapsing into indie cliché.
There's a lineage here that traces back to Fluxus and street performance documentation, but the brothers frame it with the formal clarity of sculptural cinema, letting the constructed objects speak rather than the artist's intent.
The decision to shoot the parade in full daylight, without music or narrator, means every edit becomes a breath—the film trusts the sheer weirdness and scale of 170 pounds of trash-made Transformers to carry the weight, and it does.