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Ilha das Flores, or Island of Flowers, is an island in a lake in Brazil which serves as a garbage dump for the nearby city of Porto Alegre. In order to do this, the supposed private act of waste making is made an unavoidably public issue (Source: Gambetta 2009 p.28-30 link). The primary effort by director Jorge Furtado is to offer through bitter irony (there are no flowers on the island of flowers, we are reminded) a picture of the inhumanity of consumption and extreme class inequality. They eat, we are told, sauce from the tomatoes that were fit for eating. The perfume seller, Mrs Anete, flashes a photogenic smile across her face, joined by shots of both her wedding pictures and her middle class family gathered around the dinner table. The contrast between settings of consumption is intentionally stark. Children of a shantytown near the dump are left to sort through whatever is deemed unfit for pigs, a pathetic remainder of human and animal consumption. Upon arriving at the dump, the tomato is sorted out by the owner of a pig. We learn, through the course of the cartoonish documentary, of how the tomato is picked, who picks it, where it is sold, how money is exchanged for vegetables, where the rotten tomato travels to, and how it is sorted through after it reaches the landfill. The parts of waste management are disassembled and reassembled from the lens of a tomato. The film follows the vector of a tomato that is thrown out by a fictional Brazilian perfume seller, Mrs. In its depiction of a tomato's journey from Japanese-run plantation to supermarket to middle-class ‘Roman Catholic’ kitchen to garbage-can to the ominous Brazilian island of the film's title, Isle of Flowers allows the spectator to glimpse a trajectory that neatly delineates the various social fields imbricated in the consumerist landscape of the last century, from the highest corporate echelons to the poverty-stricken bottom-feeders (Source: Diffrient 2007 np link). The rest, which is considered inadequate for the pigs, is given to poor women and children to eat (Source: Anon nda np link). There, the organic material considered adequate is selected as food for pigs. Together with the rest of the garbage, the tomato is taken to Isle of Flowers (Ilha das Flores), Porto Alegre's landfill. Mrs Anete intends to prepare a tomato sauce for the pork, but, having considered one of Mr Suzuki's tomatoes inadequate, she throws it in the garbage. Each exchange requires the presence of money, which is, together with the tomato, the constant element in the story.
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And the difference between tomatoes, pigs and human beings becomes clear (Source: Anon 2010 np link).īeginning at Mr Suzuki's tomato field, the tomato is then sold to a supermarket, where it is acquired by Mrs Anete, a perfume saleswoman, together with some pork. ISLAND OF FLOWERS follows it up until its real end, among animals, trash, women and children. There is a lot of beautiful (yet devastating) footage (Source: regardemylasheskgm 2005 np link).Ī tomato is planted, harvested and sold at a supermarket, but it rots and ends up in the trash. The film is an intriguing commentary on humanity disguised into a story about a tomato, from it being grown to being thrown in the landfill.