Nicaragua, today

About 1,500 people arrive daily at the 'la Chureca' landfill in Managua, Nicaragua, near the barrio of Acahualinca, on the shores of the great Lake Nicaragua, and from the collection and sale of garbage they derive little money to survive. Fifty-three percent are under the age of 18. Children even from the age of four begin their work 'career', helping to supervise the collected materials, sorting, cleaning up. They collect at first the 'easier' materials, paper and plastic; sometimes they find a toy among the trash. At 14 they know how to do 'everything' that a 'basurero' worker needs to know how to do. Ninety-two percent of the dump's people live in dilapidated houses; at the foot of the 'Chureca' has sprung up a small settlement of shacks made of sheet metal and wood in which live, in addition to families, prostitutes and huelepega, users of glue and other drugs. At the 42-hectare 'Chureca,' dozens of trucks unload nine hundred tons of waste every day. They are awaited by pickers who quickly 'attack' the newly unloaded pile with makeshift tools. The vehicles raise clouds of blinding dust. Periodically with planes, fuel is spread and fires are set; more highly toxic smoke invades the people of the dump. In summer, temperatures exceed forty degrees. In winter, under torrential rains, the landfill is a swamp and sinks in mud. The risks are diverse; from accidents caused by truck drivers to injuries from sharp objects. Infirmities are aggravated by the lack of hygiene: coughs, malaria fevers, hemorrhagic dengue, lice, skin infections, blood poisoning from mercury.

Here lives Maria ( the amazing Ala Alejandra Medal) with her mother who raises puppies for resale, the same puppies the little girl loves, to whom she brings food from the dump disobeying her mother's rules, as that food is harmful to their health.

Something terrible happens and the rules of illegal trade cannot be broken therefore the mother has to take her daughter to an underground place where many children are trained to recycle garbage, to get her away from herself and the danger of being with her.

The separation of the great love between mother and daughter, fuels the fierce anger that grows in the little girl who does not give up looking for her mother with whom she shared stories of fantastic animals such as the cat-women..

Mary shares games and nursery rhymes of death with children, often orphaned and sick from living conditions.

But she does not give up, anger fuels her energy and she continues her search until some marks on her body make the long-awaited promise indelible in her.

A film of brutal love, of life at the mercy of death, where nature is pollution, survival a miracle.However, the power of Mary's anger seems unstoppable, the little girl fears nothing because she has nothing to lose but her own tragic ontological existence.

It all takes place in one of the most extraordinary archaeological sites in the world where the "footprints of Acahualinca" have been found: six thousand years ago men and animals left their traces, 'huellas,' on the shores of the Lake. Ash has preserved to this day this remote record of life and death on the American continent. Six thousand years later men, women and children walk the paths through the refuse of the present-day inferno of Acahualinca.

20-Aug-2023 by Beatrice