A vision of a city environmentally at the end of its tether.

When photographer Wang Jiuliang began looking into waste disposal in China's capital, he had no idea of the scale of the city's environmental problems. Out beyond Beijing's Sixth Ring Road he found a ring of another kind - hundreds of landfills, many of them illegal and totally unregulated, taking thousands of tones of unsorted waste every day. The deeper Wang delved into the problem, the more jaw-dropping the scenes he uncovered.

Wang films it all with a beautifully poetic eye that serves to make the content of his images all the more unnerving. This is the endpoint of the consumerist dream the West has been blindly pursuing for decades, and which China has now enthusiastically embraced.

Wang Jiuliang is a guest of the festival.

D/P/S Wang Jiuliang WS dGenerate Films L Mandarin w/English subtitles TD digibeta/2011

Read an extended article on Beijing Beseiged by Waste at Senses of Cinema.