Scrap (2023)
Director: Stacey Tenenbaum Run Time: 78 min. Release Year: 2022
Country: Canada
Language: English
About the film:
Official selection at the 2022 Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival
Discover the vast and strangely beautiful places where things go to die and meet the people who collect, restore, and recycle the world’s scrap. A love letter to the things we use in our daily lives, Scrap (2023) scratches beneath flaking paint and rusting metal to reveal the beauty and pathos in the ugliness we leave behind.
This cinematic documentary tells the story of people who each have a deep connection to objects that have reached their “end of life”. Together these stories convey a deeper environmental and human message about our relationship to things, the sadness we feel at their eventual loss, and the joy that we can find in giving them a new purpose. Things, like people, show a certain beauty in their old age. Like us, they carry the weight of their history and the markings and scars accumulated through their lifespan. With the loss of these objects, we are also losing parts of our history and the cultural memory which they embody.
By showing discarded goods in a new and engaging way, the film raises awareness about the fate of the things we use and explores how artists, and other creative thinkers, can be part of finding usefulness in the things we discard.
About the filmmaker:
Stacey Tenenbaum is an award-winning writer, director and creative producer. In 2014 she founded H2L Productions, a boutique documentary film production company specializing in crafting international character-driven stories. H2L Productions’ first documentary, Shiners (2017) premiered at Hot Docs and was broadcast on the documentary Channel, TV5, and PBS. Tenenbaum’s second film Pipe Dreams (2019) also premiered at Hot Docs and was broadcast on the Documentary Channel, NHK, SVT, and PBS. The environmental film Scrap (2023) is her third feature documentary. Before turning her attention to film, Tenevaum worked in television for 16 years, producing and co-creating award-winning documentary series such as The Beat (CTV) and In Real Life (YTV).
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