Holy Shit: Can Poop Save The World? is a feature-length documentary movie by Puerto Rican filmmaker Rubén Abruña [produced by Thurn Film, in co-production with Peacock Film (CH). The release for German and Austrian cinema will be in Fall 2023]. This movie considers tips on how to sustainably reuse human waste “to extend international meals safety, environmental safety, hygiene” and “to mitigate local weather change.”
Description: What occurs to the meals we digest after it leaves our our bodies? Is it waste to be discarded or a useful resource to be reused? In search of solutions, director Rubén Abruña embarks on an investigative and entertaining quest by means of 16 cities throughout 4 continents.
He follows the poop path from the lengthy Parisian sewers to an enormous wastewater remedy plant in Chicago. The presumed answer to make use of the semi-solid stays of the remedy course of as a fertilizer proves to be a residing nightmare, as a result of they include heavy metals and poisonous PFAS chemical compounds.
Can excreta be used to develop meals and ease the upcoming fertilizer shortage? He meets the Poop Pirates from Uganda who by means of work and songs educate folks tips on how to flip feces into secure fertilizer. In rural Sweden, an engineer exhibits him a dry bathroom that makes fertilizer from urine.
In Hamburg and Geneva, he discovers residential complexes with localized remedy vegetation, not related to sewers, that produce electrical energy and fertilizer from human excrements. In the long run, the director finds solutions to sustainably reuse human poop and pee that additionally enhance international meals safety, environmental safety, and hygiene and mitigate local weather change.
Director Rubén Abruña explains: Round 20 years in the past, I skilled a sanitation epiphany in my homeland of Puerto Rico after I used a dry compost bathroom. I used to be pleasantly stunned to seek out that there have been no disagreeable odors after doing my enterprise, and that I solely wanted to make use of two cups of natural matter to cowl the deposit, as an alternative of flushing seven liters of consuming water. As I left the room, I felt glad that I had made a constructive contribution to my rapid atmosphere, and much more so after I realized that my excrement could be used to fertilize a vegetable backyard.
A number of years later, I made a decision to make a 52-minute movie about the home that launched me to the compost bathroom. The movie, referred to as “La Casa Ausente / The Absent Home,” was launched in 2014 and screened at greater than a dozen worldwide movie festivals throughout 5 continents. It continues to generate curiosity and demand by means of its distributor, Icarus Movies.
Regardless of the success of the movie, I continued to marvel why compost bathrooms aren’t extra broadly used.
As a toddler, I accompanied my father, a soil scientist who labored on a number of agricultural tasks across the island, to rice and low plantations the place I realized concerning the significance of fertilizers and water for rising meals.
Within the early Eighties, I used to be impressed by two documentary filmmakers, George Stoney from New York College’s movie college and Jean Rouch, a pioneer of cinema-verité. They taught me concerning the transformative energy of documentary movies.
All these experiences got here collectively, just like the natural matter, humidity, worms, excreta, and thermophilic micro organism that create fertilizer, and led me in 2014 to embark on a analysis challenge that culminated within the movie “Holy Shit: Can Poop Save The World?”
Extra data:
A movie by Ruben Abruña
Digicam: Hajo Schomerus
Sound: Ralf Weber
Enhancing: Cécile Welter
Music: Ulrich Kodjo Wendt
Narrator (German model): Christoph Maria Herbst
Narrator (English model): Rubén Abruña
Cinema Distribution: Farbfilm, World distributor: Autlook
Impression marketing campaign: Assume-Movie Impression Manufacturing
For extra data, see https://holyshit.international/ and https://holyshit.international/about-the-film/