Enclosing open-air dumps and outlawing waste picking are key approaches to modernizing cities around the world. THE WASTE COMMONS explores the dramatic transformations involved in the impending redevelopment of the city waste dump in Dakar, Senegal, and the lives that hang in the balance. It follows charismatic Zidane, trailblazing Adja, and their waste picker community, as they battle to defend their carefully crafted worlds and rights to waste.

Director Biography - Rosalind Fredericks, Sarita West

Rosalind (Rozy) Fredericks is an urban geographer and Associate Professor at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized study, specializing in urban environmental social movements in West Africa. She has been working in Senegal for over 20 years conducting research on the politics of waste labor in Dakar. Her book Garbage Citizenship, which was awarded the Toyin Falola Book Award for the best book in African Studies, chronicled the municipal waste workers’ union as it battled for respect and improved working conditions in the wake of structural adjustment. She also edited two volumes with esteemed historian Mamadou Diouf on citizenship in African cities: Les arts de la citoyenneté au Sénégal: Espaces contestés et civilités urbaines (Editions Karthala, 2013) and The Arts of Citizenship in African Cities: Infrastructures and Spaces of Belonging (Palgrave MacMillan, 2014). Fredericks is the co-director of the Discard Studies Collaborative at NYU. The Waste Commons emerged out of her ethnographic research (supported by a major grant from the National Science Foundation) at Dakar’s dump since 2016 and her advocacy work with the association of Mbeubeuss waste pickers and the non-profit organization WIEGO that defends the rights of informal workers globally. It is her first documentary film.

Sarita West has been making natural history films and social documentaries for 27 years. Sarita established Alchemy Films in San Francisco in 1994. She wrote, directed and produced two award-winning 35mm short fiction films before making the orangutan documentary, The Disenchanted Forest (2004) for National Geographic Channels. Sarita co-produced the PBS documentary, The Split Horn (2003), and was an associate producer on the PBS documentary, The Real Dirt on Farmer John (2006). In London, Sarita produced, directed and edited Fire Burn Babylon (2010), Exiles and Outlaws (2014), and has produced short films for The Guardian and Barts N.H.S. Trust. Sarita shot, edited, directed and produced ​In The Shadow of Ebola (2015) for PBS/Independent Lens and The Land Beneath Our Feet​ (2016) for the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Sarita is post-producing Outspoken, a social justice rap documentary partially filmed in Senegal, Kenya and Liberia. In recent years Alchemy Films has sought stories that consider life in the Anthropocene.