The Discarded: A Tale of Two Rios

This video, released five months ago, provides the following description:
When the world descends on Rio de Janeiro for the 2016 Olympic and Paralympic Games, they are going to get more, or perhaps less, than they bargained for: shopping carts, couches, plastic pollution, and an offensive smell now dominate it’s once iconic waters.

This short film unfolds through the eyes of nine year old, Artúr. Like the plastic bottle that descends from the slums to the sea, so too does Artúr, looking for a way out. After school at Projeto Grael, Artúr is learning how to sail, gaining valuable skills that might help him move beyond life in the favelas. Theirs are simple journeys with enormously challenging implications: what does it mean to ignore subsets of society, to label some as worthy, and others as discarded?

Set amidst the whirlwind of the world’s largest international sporting event, The Discarded: A Tale of Two Rios, juxtaposes government pandering to wealthy patrons and tourists, in stark contrast to the lives of locals, who live with pollution on Guanabara Bay every day.