Innocence and garbage

INNOCENCE AND GARBAGE. “It spent several nights in a stinking slum in Manila”, states director Vilgot Sjöman. “The experience was so disconcerting I simply had to return later on with a camera and a freelance crew of friends. We wandered around there for days on end amongst thousands of human scavengers… When the film was finally edited we could see what it all was about: Westerns innocence concerning poverty in the third world”. Can people in the western world ever fully understand what it means to live – and try to survive in absolute, hopeless poverty? Director Vilgot Sjöman chose an unusual way of presenting the inexorably merciless terms of life in the slums. Many of his film and journalist colleagues in the Swedish welfare state were shocked, and found Sjöman’s approach ridiculous (“You can’t make TV out of this!”). Does their indignation show that Sjöman actually was able to convey real insight into a way of life which can threaten Western conceptions of how miserable our existence may be?