Film Screening of "Plastic China" and Q&A with Director WANG Jiuliang

Date: 

Tuesday, November 28, 2017, 6:30pm to 8:45pm

Location: 

CGIS South, Tsai Auditorium, 1730 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA

plastic china partial poster

After the screening, Director WANG Jiuliang will attend via Skype for a Q&A with the audience moderated by Professor ZHANG Ling of Boston College and the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. The discussion will be interpreted by Canaan Morse, a Ph.D. candidate in Chinese Literature at Harvard. 

Boston-area premiere co-sponsored by the Harvard-China Project on Energy, Economy and Environment, Harvard Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences; Environment in Asia Series, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies; and Emergent Visions Film Screening Series, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies.

Free admission to the film screening is made possible through the generous support of the Harvard Global Institute

About the Film: As the world’s biggest plastic waste importer, China receives ten million tons per year from most of the developed countries around the world. With high external costs impacting the local environment and health, these imports are reborn here in these plastic workshops into “recycled” raw materials for the appetite of China - the world factory. This waste is then exported back to where they came from with a new face such as manufactured clothing or toys. Following the daily lives of two families living in a typical plastic waste household-recycling workshop, PLASTIC CHINA explores how this work of recycling plastic waste with their bare hands takes a toll not only on their health, but also their own dilemma of poverty, disease, pollution and death.

About the Director: Director of the award-winning documentary film BEIJING BESIEGED BY WASTE, WANG Jiuliang graduated from the School of Cinematic Arts of the Communication University of China in 2007. From 2007 to 2008, he finished a set of photographic works about Chinese traditional superstitions. He started investigating landfill pollution around Beijing in 2008, and in 2011, finished BEIJING BESIEGED BY WASTE, a set of photographic works and a documentary with the same name. Since 2012, he has been working on and promoting the documentary PLASTIC CHINA.