From CBS, Oct 8, 2020:
CBSN Originals is releasing its first feature-length film, "Welcome to Pine Lake," which began as a story of America's only city run entirely by women, but turned into an uncomfortable look at institutional racism. In this preview shared on "CBS This Morning," the Pine Lake police chief shares why she wants to serve the community.
by Charles Bramesco
Mon 28 Feb 2022 13.56 EST
The time has come for a long overdue conversation about a menace with the potential for a sweeping crisis, an urgent threat to the very fabric of American society: poop. Everybody does it, but we’d rather not think about it, and avoid discussing it unless we have to. In new docuseries Wasteland (now streaming on Paramount Plus), director Elisa Gambino informs us in no uncertain terms that we do have to, and isn’t hesitant about showing us why.
“The philosophy for us was to try to present poop in a serious way, which is hard, because it’s so easy to slip into potty humor,” Gambino said over the phone during a stopover in Montana. “But we wanted to look at poop and how it affects environmental justice, to treat it with seriousness without being so serious that people can’t watch it. You try to find a middle ground.”
Fecal matter represents a clear and present danger to that most precious human right of access to clean water, contaminating natural sources like streams and bubbling up into bathtubs and sinks due to faulty septic infrastructures. In choosing to shed fresh light on this vital, oft-ignored topic, Gambino faced an unsavory predicament. How much depiction is too much? Can something be too gross for TV? (There were times when she wasn’t sure she’d make it, developing headaches from the potent stenches along with her husband and director of photography Neal Broffman.) She didn’t want to shortchange just how abject some of this spillage and seepage could be, but at the same time, she understood that viewers have their limits. Like the rickety, untended pipes leaking bacteria into the water supply, people can only take so much shit before hitting a breaking point.
“The episodes are quite beautiful,” she says. “They’re cinematic. We tried to create a feeling of all-is-well, where on the surface, flowers are blooming and corn is growing. But then there’s a theme of the underlying. Some people have said this looks too good to be about poop … The whole year I spent working on this, I divided my friends into two groups: the ones that would let me talk to them about the series and politely listen, and the ones who would just look at me and then change the subject, or walk away. I was happy on Thursday, when it premiered and I could say, ‘Look! I was really doing something! I wasn’t just talking about poop!’ Now, I don’t have to talk about poop so much. But I can’t flush the toilet or turn on the faucet without thinking about it.”
For the resilient souls featured in Gambino’s series, excrement isn’t something to think about, but a terrible fact of daily life. Each of the four episodes concentrates on the hazards of contamination in a different state, as onscreen reporter and executive producer Adam Yamaguchi interviews the public works officials, activists and ordinary folks caught up in the vast impact of this ecological quagmire. In Alabama, Lowndes county falls within the predominantly African American Black Belt,and the specters of centuries-old racism still wreak secondhand havoc on the underserved population. Just outside New York City’s limits, the people of Mount Vernon share horror stories of brown geysers pumping their homes full of raw sewage. Down in southwest Florida, septic tanks have caused lethal “algal blooms” that wipe out fish and other regional fauna while rendering water unsafe to drink. And in Iowa, the booming pig-farming industry generates more manure than anyone knows what to do with, and locals pay the price in cancer.
Across each case, the constant is the insidious way that institutional neglect ripples out to create personal consequences. “I think sometimes too much responsibility is put on individuals, and we don’t think enough about the cause,” Gambino says. “In Alabama, people are responsible for their own septic system and they get absolutely no help. We’re always telling people to recycle their plastic at the cost of thinking about who’s making the plastic. People think it’s an individual choice to live in a house with a septic tank, but it’s not. This is everybody’s problem. We need to look at the legislation in Iowa that’s not serving the people. Infrastructure money needs to go to Mount Vernon and released to the people once received. It’s not just the collapsing pipes, it’s people doing things to make this job so much harder.”
Without funding or the staff it would pay for, Mount Vernon Public Works Commissioner Damani Bush has no choice but to rush around town, plugging up each successive calamity like he’s jamming corks into one big sinking ship. Over and over, we’re shown how natural and human-made factors combine to leave our most vulnerable in jeopardy. One might sense a feeling of futility creeping on as they watch, as if the Earth has begun rejecting us and we’re powerless to stop it, but the truth is that there’s still plenty to be done. In Alabama, laws long since out-of-date hold the towns of Lowndes county down as much as any inevitabilities from the changing climate. The state has largely left the low-income community of mostly Black residents to fend for themselves in the fight for even the most basic creature comforts of modern life.
“In the episode about Alabama, Dr Robinson talks about how following the civil rights movement, there was a lot of hope for people across the Black Belt that they’d find new prosperity,” Gambino says. “Every tool was used to make sure this didn’t happen. These systems that they rely on, the expensive systems of engineering – they’re left on their own to maintain them after they’ve been purchased. There isn’t even insurance available, where you can pay monthly and then be all right if your septic tank breaks. We have it for cars and homes, and this is sanitation, no less important. In Mount Vernon, people might look at an all-Black leadership and think that it can’t be an issue of racism, because look at local government. But the problems are so baked-in that they existed long before this change, divided by old racisms. I just want people to walk away with something to think about.”
While Gambino has accepted that the oncoming deluge of sewage represents a problem too vast for any of us to take on, her film nonetheless leaves us with a call to action. All we can do is hold lawmakers’ feet to the flames in our demands to adjust the laws, as in Iowa, where something as simple as a stricter ordinance against spraying manure on frozen ground could make a planet of difference. “Legislators have concrete knowledge of what needs to be done to address these problems,” Gambino says, “but there’s no will among the legislators to do anything.”
The structuring absence would seem to be the emergency conditions in Flint, Michigan, the most high-profile battleground in the fight for clean, non-contaminated water. But Gambino has observed a simplifying effect in how the public processes information that often places Flint at the forefront of this dialogue, as if we prefer to mentally constrain the sewage to a single location. The unfortunate truth, however, is that it’s everywhere. America is drowning in a vast sea of it, and we can’t afford to deny it any longer. If this feels like a stomach-turning thing to think about, just consider how much more visceral the response will be once it’s happening in your own home.
“Not to take anything away from Flint, that’s so important right now, but the focus on it has sometimes kept us from looking at other places as well,” she says. “There are millions of people across the United States with non-potable water. It’s like Commissioner Bush says – this is a nationwide problem. We didn’t even get into the situations with the Navajo Nation, for instance, or West Virginia. It’s happening everywhere.”
By Felicia Feaster, For the AJC
Director Elisa Gambino has a knack for tackling some deep schisms in America: divisions between rich and poor, Black and white, industrial profit and environmental concerns.
Gambino and her husband, Neal Broffman, a cinematographer and editor with their production company One Production Place, continue their commitment to storytelling with a deep vein of social consciousness in their CBS Reports docuseries “Wasteland.” The film debuts Feb. 24 on Paramount+, and is centered on the often tragic stories surrounding America’s failing sewage disposal system.
Gambino, a former CNN International journalist-turned-filmmaker and Collier Hills resident made her film debut with the meaty, close-to-home 2020 documentary, “Welcome to Pine Lake,” the first feature-length film released by CBSN Originals.
“Welcome to Pine Lake” showed the contradictions that define the Pine Lake community, where a gay mayor and all-female city council seem to embody progressive values.
But the town’s white residents, with their performative celebration of the arts, inclusivity and a free flow of ideas, have also conveniently overlooked courtrooms filled with Black people preyed upon in local police traffic stops whose fines help to fill the town’s coffers.
“Welcome to Pine Lake” is a scathing indictment of the privilege of obliviousness when it comes to class and race. And Gambino notes that even following the release of the documentary, Pine Lake continues its predatory ticketing practices as a source of revenue.
Gambino and Broffman met in Amman during the first Gulf War when Broffman was working out of the CNN London bureau and Gambino was in the Rome bureau. They started dating in Mogadishu, got engaged in Bosnia and were married in Rome. They’ve lived in Atlanta for 23 years.
An accomplished documentary filmmaker in his own right, Broffman is the director of the 2015 film “Help Us Find Sunil Tripathi” about a Brown University student who became the target of vicious social media speculation that he was connected to the Boston Marathon bombing when he went missing in 2013.
The couple continues their work together in “Wasteland.” The film initially focused on Lowndes County in Alabama’s Black Belt, where a lack of adequate sewage disposal in predominately Black neighborhoods has led the United Nations and others to liken the region to something out of a developing nation.
But Gambino saw waste as a topic far larger in scope than just rural Alabama and expanded the production to cover “sanitation as it relates to systemic racism in Mt. Vernon, New York; climate change, over-development and septic tanks in southwest Florida; and hog manure in Iowa,” she says. “Because I wanted to share stories about the important links between our waste and the human right to clean water and sanitation.”
CBS News correspondent and executive producer Adam Yamaguchi travels to those four communities in New York, Alabama, Florida and Iowa to show the devastating impact of crumbling sewage infrastructure, factory farming and poverty on the environment and on individual Americans’ lives.
In Iowa, the film crew documents manure run-off from the state’s massive hog farms that has contaminated ground water with toxic nitrates. Residents have been left with a host of cancers and waterways so filled with waste that swimming is an impossibility.
And in Fort Myers, Florida, one of the fastest-growing cities in the country, sewer systems that can’t keep up with population growth imperil the state’s rich ecosystem and abundant wildlife, spawning red tides and algal blooms.
Yamaguchi interviews Mt. Vernon resident Linda McNeil, who has had to clean raw sewage that has backed up into her home countless times over the past two decades because of the city’s crumbling sewer system. A kind of waste crisis team is shown heading to emergencies throughout the city where basements, garages and businesses have periodically been flooded with raw sewage.
After reporting on sub-standard sanitation in India and Indonesia, Yamaguchi says he was astounded to discover such deplorable conditions in American cities like Mt. Vernon.
“Given my previous reporting, it was all the more shocking to find that Americans too are dealing with inadequate sanitation — with failing septic systems and straight pipes emptying human waste into pits, sometimes merely feet away from their homes.”
“The idea that people live in constant fear of sewage backing up into their homes, in a city just miles away from Manhattan, I think would shock most people,” says Yamaguchi.
'Help Us Find Sunil Tripathi'
Director: Neal Broffman
Synopsis: Sunil Tripathi, a music student of East Indian descent at Providence's Brown University, goes missing after battling depression. So his family puts up notices on social media to try to find him. A month later, there's a bombing at the Boston Marathon and the media posts pictures of two suspects. One looks somewhat like Sunil, so online viewers immediately jump to the conclusion that Sunil is a Muslim terrorist who had disappeared to plan the bombing of the marathon. His family is tormented by online haters. But they can't believe Sunil could possibly be the bomber.
Scorecard: 9 (out of 10). This documentary by a team of journalists with a background at CNN tells its story journalistically and cinematically with so many good elements, it's a textbook for documentary filmmaking. They don't hit us over the head with the exposition, they let it unfold like a novel. A friend says Sunil didn't want a backup plan in life; he only wanted to be the best saxophonist possible. Then they show footage of Sunil reading "The Fountainhead" – the Bible of individual achievement and personal responsibility. Next they show him losing interest in school and falling into a depression before disappearing. Finally, all hell breaks loose over the bombing of the Boston Marathon and everyone tries to figure out what went wrong. The film examines depression as a physical illness and the responsibility of the media, but it has a harder time addressing personal and societal responsibility. It doesn't accept suicide as a choice for someone who perhaps couldn't achieve his dreams and it doesn't demand the same ethics for users of the Internet as it demands from old media. One of the best things about the Internet, says a young man, is its unrestricted freedom. But that's also what gives it the potential for horrifying abuse.
Bruce Fessier
