Acclaimed by Al Gore as ‘beautiful, insightful and thought-provoking’, Jennifer Baichwal’s award-winning documentary Manufactured Landscapes centres on renowned artist Edward Burtynsky, whose large-scale photographs portray the devastating impact of industrial expansion on the environment. Baichwal observes the artist at work amid some of the most surreal landscapes of the 21st century: China’s mountains of computer waste; the Yangtze River where whole towns are disappearing in the flooding caused by the Three Gorges Dam; the shipbreaking yards of Bangladesh; Shanghai, with its increasingly crowded skyline and millions of new inhabitants. Eschewing polemics, Burtynsky aims simply to bring these landscapes into our consciousness, to provoke reflection on some highly inconvenient truths.
Manufactured Landscapes will be screened in the Anatomy Theatre at the College’s Strand Campus on the 24th October at 18.30pm, presented by the British Film Institute.
The Arts & Humanities Festival 