Welcome to Landfill Harmonic. A film about a garbage picker, a music teacher and a group of children from a Paraguayan slum who play instruments made entirely of garbage. Landfill Harmonic is a beautiful story about the transformative power of music, which also highlights two vital issues of our times: poverty and waste pollution. The story develops in one of the poorest slums in Latin America. Just outside Asuncion, Paraguay; Cateura is the city’s trash dump. It is built on a landfill. Here, people live in a sea of garbage. And they live from garbage. 

Surrounded by stories of drug-violence, alcoholism and destitution, they make herculean efforts to reaffirm their life and dignity. 

There was no money for real instruments when local musician Favio Chavez started his music school in the barrio, so together they started to make instruments from trash – violins and cellos from oil drums, flutes from water pipes and spoons, guitars from packing crates. Our film documents the origins of the Orchestra and, as the story evolves, follows them on a world tour. Join us in this journey and witness the mind-boggling inventive effort of a humble garbage picker, and a music teacher that using their ingenuity, where able to create instruments out of recycled materials, bringing to life one of the world’s most unlikely orchestras. 

It is entirely made of garbage. They call it “The Recycled Orchestra”. 

Coming soon. On January 2014.