Movie Screening: Manufactured Landscapes

Olin Arts Center, 105
75 Russell Street
Lewiston, Maine 04240
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Manufactured Landscapes is a 2006 feature-length documentary film about the work of photographer Edward Burtynsky. It reveals the gritty underside of industrial landscapes. Burtynsky explores the subtle beauty amid the waste generated by slag heaps, dumps and factories. Memorable scenes include: a Chinese iron factory that employs 23,000 workers and makes most of the world’s irons and where where employees are berated to produce faster; Three Gorges Dam, which, along with being the largest dam in the world, has uprooted more than one million people and flooded 13 cities, 140 towns and 1350 villages since the beginning of its construction in 1994; and ship breaking on the coast of Bangladesh.

Burtynsky’s stunning photographs manage to be both beautiful and simultaneously horrifying, and film director Jennifer Baichwal captures both the aesthetic and concept behind Burtynsky’s ground-breaking photography in her documentary film.