Matter Out of Place

Matter Out Of Place is an incredibly innovative and strangely beautiful environmental film about rubbish and the way it has spread to the most remote corners of the planet. Acclaimed director Nikolaus Geyrhalter (Our Daily Bread, Homo Sapiens) uses dizzying camerawork and clever sound design to follow the traces of our refuse across the world from ski resorts at the top of Alpine peaks to desert clean ups at the Burning Man Festival. He sheds light on the endless struggle of people to gain control over their ever proliferating quantities of waste.

There is an aesthetic of the ugly. In all that is ugly lies beauty. The film plays with this. The places we see are fascinating. But we can’t stop to look at just the surface. We have to go further. Everything we produce or use ends up to be trash at some point. Once we throw it away, it’s not gone. The process starts just then. A big industry is behind it and a huge amount of people are concerned by it. In Europe we have a relatively good way to cope with trash by burning it and by gaining energy out of it. But still it doesn’t disappear completely either.

Director Nikolaus Geyrhalter, from an interview with Cineuropa