Baffle Their Minds with Bullsh*t, Kerry Leigh

A writer on the street.

Beirut International Tango Festival

Promotional film for the 2010 Beirut International Tango Festival.

Pearls Beyond the Price

The story of two Qatari generations coming to grips with the inevitable tide of the 21st century and all that it will wash away in its wake.

Somos Buzos

A community surrounds the Santiago garbage dump in Dominican Republic that is named "Cienfuegos," or, 100 fires.

My Village, My Lobster

The powerful and harrowing story of the indigenous Miskito lobster divers along Nicaragua's Caribbean Coast who risk their lives diving for the region's most lucrative resource—the Caribbean spiny lobster.

Zubarah

Zubarah was an old vibrant pearl and fishing city that fell to ruins only 150 years ago, and is now being excavated.

Qatar: Books Unbound

The Universal Digital Library in Carnegie Mellon University is doing a massive digitization effort of rare books and libraries across the world.

Six Days in Kazakhstan

A short atmospheric piece about my 6 days in Kazakhstan on a preliminary trip to begin planning both ethnographic and marketing pieces for iCarnegie.

Film Archive

Official website: SomosBuzos.com

Somos Buzos: The Trash Divers is a feature length documentary about a community of people called buzos who live around a smoking dump that crouches outside the city of Santiago in the Dominican Republic. These buzos, or "trash divers," build their houses from garbage, feed their children with rotten food, and make pennies by scavenging and selling metal, plastic, cardboard, and glass. They cannot read or write, and most are prevented from attending school. The film follows one buzo, Pablo Esteban, as he struggles to keep his children in school and away from the toxicity and feral violence of the dump.

The dump offers little and takes a lot: for the pennies they scrape together each day the buzos risk injury, infection, food poisoning, violence and more. The children suffer the most, from constant malnutrition to chronic illnesses, to lack of birth certificates and education. The film interviews the nefarious mayor and other unscrupulous local officials, all of whom spread the blame instead of taking action. The local media, international missionaries and aid organizations attempt to highlight the problem to little effect, until embarrassed officials call in the military. Somos Buzos watches as the city, rather than provide the buzos with jobs or an education, escalates its efforts to remove the trash, and the buzos, from sight.

Documentary film by Isabelle Carbonell.