The Fourth Kingdom
**Seen at the 2019 Atlanta Film Festival. I also reviewed the short documentary of this story back in 2017 here.
It’s weird that, during Adán Aliaga & Àlex Lora’s documentary, “The Fourth Kingdom,” this felt like a community I would love to live around. The individuals we start to focus on in this film are interesting and would be worth knowing, I think, even if their lives are not the easiest. And they are dealing with other people’s trash and recyclables for a living, while they themselves live on the outskirts of society, with little but a broken promise of the American Dream. They are so genuinely, uniquely themselves, however, that we enjoy the time getting to know them, and we want to know more after the 80 minutes is done.
The title refers to an educational video whose narration begins the film as it discusses the many uses of plastics- the “world of plastics” is the fourth kingdom, you see. In practicality for this documentary, it refers to the Sure We Can recycling facility in New York we spend the entire film in. It is a facility with mounds upon mounds, and shipping containers upon shipping containers, of plastic bottles, aluminum cans, and glass bottles, mostly bagged up, where they are kept until they are shipped to a landfill somewhere. When the film begins, it is run by Ana, and populated by people like Rene, a former alcoholic who actually lives at the facility. We follow them over the course of a couple of years as they go about their routine, and they share pieces of their lives. Some move on, some die, some seem destined to be stuck there forever. There is not an artificial narrative built in; we just watch as they live.
Aliaga and Lora’s film is largely in Spanish, because it’s a facility run by immigrants, in a community of immigrants, whom came to this country for opportunity, but have found none. We do not really find out what these people wanted to do when they came to America, and it doesn’t matter, because this is what they are doing. As with the monks of “Into Great Silence,” the filmmakers are not interested in a full exploration into these individual lives, but chronicling them, so that we might come to empathize, and appreciate, the commitment to what they do. After all, would we want to do that job? I wouldn’t, but I have nothing but respect for the people in this movie who are- they have a sense of purpose that is laudable in anyone doing a job.
