A few kilometres outside Paraguay’s capital city of Asunción is one of the poorest slums in Latin America. Cateura is the capital’s municipal rubbish dump. 2,500 families live here, earning their livelihood from the landfill trash. But right next door is the music school run by Favio Chavez. In order to offer the children of the gancheros, the name for the recycling workers, a chance to escape their hopeless plight, he started giving them music lessons. But instruments are hard to find and they cost a fortune. For many local children, making music remained no more than a dream. Chavez then had a breakthrough idea: making instruments from rubbish! The first violin was made from a jerry can, an old oil barrel was turned into a cello, with the strings played with wooden spoons and the heel of a woman’s shoe. Using these »new« instruments an ambitious young orchestra was put together. Social media coverage kicked in and the orchestra found itself catapulted into the international limelight.

For five years Townsley and Allgood accompanied this extraordinary orchestra along its journey from the very first out-of-tune rehearsals in the wooden huts of Cateura to sold-out concerts at major venues all over the world. Cross-cutting back and forth between the orchestra’s globe-trotting travels to the West and the precarious life led by the children’s families back home, the two directors highlight the contrast between these two worlds. This emotional story about the transformative power of music in one of the poorest areas of the world won numerous festival audience awards and continues to tour around the world.

Awards for ›Landfill Harmonic‹ (Selection)
Audience Award – South by Southwest 2015 | Audience Award & Inspiring Lives Award – San Francisco Green Film Festival 2015 | Audience Award – Leeds International Film Festival 2015