FROM THE TYEE
THE RELATIONSHIP between people and their junk is a curious one. A 2022 documentary called Scrap shows just how oddly intertwined these two things can be.
When the film’s director, Stacey Tenenbaum, came across a photo of an aeroplane graveyard just outside of Moscow, the place’s ghostly quality—seemingly frozen in time—led her to wonder what happens to these kinds of things when they are no longer useful.
The film is chock-a-block with visual pleasure. Viewers float alongside retired trams and peer into the rotting husks of muscle cars, spotted with moss and lichen. But a harder message lurks beneath the lilting images: the way back from irrelevance and obsolescence demands work—often the hard, dirty and dangerous kind.
That humans use and then discard endless
