Above: The Landfill Harmonic Orchestra from their Facebook page.
This is an amazing video that will grab at your heart. It is about people in Cateuri, Paraguay, a slum built on a landfill, without any hope of escaping. The Landfill Harmonic reveals a mind-boggling, inventive effort to change that – musical instruments made from trash. In the barrios of Paraguay, a humble garbage picker uses his ingenuity to craft instruments out of recycled materials – and a youth orchestra is born. Music arises and children find new dreams.
A film, “The Recycled Orchestra”, is being made about these children from a Paraguayan slum who play instruments made entirely of garbage. The producers note: “The world generates about a billion tons of garbage a year. Those who live with it and from it are the poor – like the people of Cateura, Paraguay. And here they are transforming it into beauty. Landfill Harmonic follows the orchestra as it takes its inspiring spectacle of trash-into-music around the world.
The film is still in production, work began in 2010 when the producers traveled to Paraguay to film the Landfill Harmonic Orchestra. They returned to the village in 2011 to film and check on the progress of three young children who recently
entered the orchestra and resumed filming in 2012 and are continuing in 2013. They write: “Landfill Harmonic shows how trash and recycled materials can be transformed into beautiful sounding musical instruments, but more importantly, it brings witness to the transformation of precious human beings.”
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