When he made his 2008 documentary Garbage! The Revolution Starts At Home, activist filmmaker Andrew Nisker challenged a Toronto family to store all their waste in their garage – except their organics – for three months rather than putting it out on the curb, the better to create a visual image of the volume of trash generated by the Western lifestyle.
For his next project, Chemerical: Redefining Clean For A New Generation – screening Tuesday night (April 27) at the Royal Cinema – Nisker hit upon a different three-month challenge. He asked the suburban Goode family to eliminate all of the cleaning products in their home that were made from chemical products – their shampoos, their dish soaps, their hair gels, their deodorants – and use organic equivalents instead.
As he did with Garbage!, Nisker alternates between candid footage of the family struggling with the logistical problems of his challenge and interviews with experts who discuss the risks of interacting with potentially toxic chemicals on a daily basis.
It’s not exactly revelatory – unless you were entirely unaware of the cleansing properties of baking soda and vinegar – but Chemerical is intended as less of a teaching tool and more of a call to ecological consciousness. As with Garbage!, it’s there to make us consider our own toxic footprint, and offer helpful suggestions to reduce its impact. You can find many more at the Chemerical website, if you’re curious.
There’s no better time for this sort of message. Happy Earth Week, everybody![rssbreak]
