There are indeed dumpster divers everywhere. The Norwegian Brodcasting Corporation (NRK, who provide both public radio and TV in Norway) last weekend ran a piece on freegan Børge Roum, who brought viewers to take part in his dumpster diving late at night. Roum is ten years in the business of protesting against excessive consumption, and takes home more or less everything, even though he’s careful about dairy products.
The piece also provided facts on thrown away food in Norway, which stand at 100 kilos (220 pounds) per person per year, making it a nationwide total of 50,000 tonnes per year.
Sweden’s second to largest TV news program, Aktuellt, tonight interviewed a Swedish freegan, who invited a team into his home, claiming everything he and his accomplice eat comes from dumpsters. For tonight, for the grand effect, they brought all the bread they would’ve been able to eat, should they want to. Check about nine minutes into this 30 minute episode of Aktuellt. For those who understand Swedish (or are very interested), a full ten minutes of on-site segments and studio discussions await.
Agnès Varda, director of the amazing documentary Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (The Gleaners and I), has a new film out—what appears to be a fantastical, memoir-documentary about her life as a New Wave pioneer, wife and lover of Jacques Demy and all-around badass. Here’s the trailor.
And here’s A.O. Scott‘s piece on the project and its creator. In it, he calls Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse “a personal and philosophical inquiry into the practice of gathering what has been discarded or passed over.” And it is. Because Varda made it. In France. If anyone else had tackled the project, it would have been a movie about freegans and politics and all that is wonky and dull and without the fun of a wacky French/Belgian woman inserting herself into the action as a very present narrator. In short, it would have been no fun at all and noone would remember that in France, they have a crazy law that requires farmers to open their farms up to the public after harvest to collect leftover food. I can’t wait to see what the rest of her life/career was like.
everydaytrash 