The film’s inclusion in this year’s environmentally-themed The New Climate underscores the global dimensions – and impact – of our disposable culture. – Allan Hunter, Screen Daily Wang delicately balances the perspectives of Yi-Jie, her father, and Kun, alternating the child’s wonderment in and adaptability to her surroundings with the adults’ more grounded, and sad, apprehension of their present circumstances, revealing at the same time a sense of modern-day China coping with inequality in its rapidly developing economy.
Wide festival exposure seems assured, particularly at events with a focus on environmental issues, and specialist distribution is a strong possibility. His gently observed portrait of the families toiling at a plastic recycling factory in Shandong builds into a damning commentary on a modern China marked by extreme divides in wealth and opportunity. The film exposes not only a disparity between Western lifestyles of consumption and those who deal with the concomitant waste, but also in the hierarchical structure of facility owners and the workers they employ for low compensation in unhealthy and sometimes abusive environments.ĭirector Jiu-liang Wang’s follow-up to debut documentary Beijing Beseiged By Waste (2011), Plastic China captures a plaintive sense of the human casualties from unfettered global consumerism. Plastic China reveals the unsafe conditions in which adults and children alike toil, as they seek to eke out a basic living by processing toxic plastic waste products that they know are polluting their rivers and lakes, contaminating the air that they breathe, and compromising their health in noticeably painful ways. The environmental justice focus of the film Will she succeed to sit in a classroom and learn? Or will she succeed her parents as an illiterate laborer in the recycling workshop? However, Yi-Jie keeps her wish alive of going to school one day, and we see her holding her playful campaign towards learning and schooling.
Instead, he spends much of his hard-earned money from the plastic workshop on alcohol. Her father, Peng, had promised to send her to school five years earlier but not yet delivered. Small packs of discarded instant black powder tells her the bitter taste of “coffee,” the English children’s learning cards teach her words like “summer” and “father’s day,” and discarded plastic dolls are her toys. She learns about the outside world sorting through the plastic refuse imported from the USA, Europe, and Japan that surrounds her. Plastic China’s main character, Yi-Jie, is an unschooled 11-year-old girl whose family works and lives in a typical plastic waste household-recycling workshop. Please see the teacher's guide for maps, background information, suggested subjects, questions and activities. As all of these issues are also raised in fictional works from the Chinese film canon -including Wang Xiaoshuai’s Beijing Bicycle, Jia Zhangke’s The World, and even Zhang Yang’s Shower- presenting Plastic China as a testament to the real-life issues to which fictional counterparts refer can enhance the impact of fictional and documentary narrative alike. Plastic China is a film that inspires discussion about a number of salient topics, including globalization, modernity, rural-urban divide, and the human and environmental impacts of consumerist culture. This polished and engaging documentary is of value to educators in numerous fields who wish to expose students to the impacts of consumption and globalization in China. This film was selected by Ken Berthel, Assistant Professor of Chinese, Whittier College View on The Global Environmental Justice site
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