Best Video Film & Cultural Center, in association with the Hamden Earth Day Committee, is pleased to present the award-winning 2022 documentary SCRAP on Thursday, April 25th at 7pm in Thornton Wilder Auditorium at the Miller Memorial Central Library Cultural Center, located at 2901 Dixwell Avenue in Hamden, CT. This screening is free and open to the public.

SCRAP is a love letter to the things we use in our daily lives. This cinematic documentary tells the story of people who each have a deep connection to objects that have reached their 'end of life'. Together these stories convey a deeper environmental and human message about our relationship to things, the sadness we feel at their eventual loss, and the joy that we can find in giving them a new purpose. Things, like people, show a certain beauty in their old age. Like us, they carry the weight of their history and the markings and scars accumulated through their lifespan. With the loss of these objects, we are also losing parts of our history and the cultural memory which they embody. By showing discarded goods in a new and engaging way, the film raises awareness about the fate of the things we use and explores how artists, and other creative thinkers, can be part of finding usefulness in the things we discard.

Director's statement

I am fascinated by things that are old and carry their history and am nostalgic for a time when life was slower, and things were made by hand and built to last. It was this nostalgia that I wanted to capture in Scrap. I made the film to show the strange beauty of objects that have reached their 'end of life' and to get people thinking about what happens to things like planes, ships, and phonebooths when they have outlived their use. While we are now conscious of the need to recycle things in our homes, few people think about what happens to larger items we use in our daily lives. Governments and corporations must dispose of tons and tons of material each year - a recycling and/or disposal challenge chich can have global implications. The two main drivers of our waste problem are overconsumption and disposable culture. Things are made cheaply to be used and thrown away. Obsolescence is built into products and consumers are encouraged to upgrade rather than fix. The move away from mechanical objects to increasingly computerized items, makes repair and recycling more difficult - and more toxic. To compound the problem, we are losing the instinct and ability to repair. These skills have been lost often within as little as one generation. And those who can still repair are being stymied by large corporations that are making it increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to repair everything from cell phones to washing machines to farm equipment. People are aware of the need to recycle, but recycling is a band-aid solution which does nothing to address the root causes of this problem. By showing the fate of objects in the film I hope to open a discussion about how we can change our production and consumption habits to extend the lifecycle of the things we use.

-Stacey Tenenbaum