DennisLittrell

This is not as good as Jiuliang Wang's more recent "Plastic China" (2016) (see my review), but it is very interesting nonetheless. And it covers more ground, as it were; in fact, Wang visited hundreds of trash dumps, landfills, pig sties, high rise construction sites, polluted rivers and streams, etc. in and around Beijing during the filming.

He shows truckloads of human waste poured into ponds, and trucks dumping huge loads of trash, especially plastic trash onto piles and piles of trash in which men, women and children make their meagre living. I was particularly grossed out by how the penned-in pigs are fed their swill (primarily semi-liquid garbage from restaurants). According to Wang, sometimes the oil from the restaurant garbage is filtered out and resold for human consumption.

Of course, what Wang shows in this film could be filmed in many other cities of the world. The point here is that Beijing is a particularly polluted city. The ground water is polluted, the air is polluted and apparently some of the food is polluted.

The reason I believe that "Plastic China" is a better film is because it focuses more closely and revealingly on the people working the trash. This film is more impersonal and not as well- focused. Additionally, in the six years of so between these two films, Wang has become both a better cinemaphotographer and more aware of the viewer's needs.

--Dennis Littrell, author of "The World Is Not as We Think It Is"

This very interesting documentary shows the life of two Chinese families three generations deep living on, beside and surrounded by plastic waste. Their job is to turn the plastic into pellets to be sold to industry.

It's a Chinese language film with English subtitles. The focus is on 11-year-old Yi Jie, daughter of Pen who works for "boss man" Kun who has come in from the country where he was a farmer to recycle plastic waste so he can afford to pay for education for his children (and no so incidentally) buy nice things like a new car. We see the children at work and play among and amidst the piles of mostly white plastic. We see the workers and children sort through the plastic for the right kind to feed the machine that makes pellets that can be sold. The children play, the families eat together, they sing, they joke, they moan about making the equivalent of five dollars a day. They dream, and strange to say learn a lot about the world by examining and reading the plastic trash from all over the world.

I learned a bit about plastic recycling some twenty years ago when for two months I walked the streets of the beach cities in the Los Angeles area collecting bottles and cans. I found out then that the plastic that was not deposit bottles was gathered into great shipping crates and sold to China. In turn many American companies bought the resulting pellets from China! This film shows why it was economic to ship the plastic waste to China and then effectively speaking buy back a value-added product. Quite simply the labor costs were and are so much less.

Curiously this is an uplifting doc with almost no political message. Because the people are shown going about their daily lives we come to feel we know them, and indeed their hopes and dreams and the way they live with one another is very much like people everywhere.

Director Jiuliang Wang demonstrates in this film that he has a fine eye for the right kind of detail and a good sense of people and even how to tell a story, because, yes this is a story, a true one about people living in poverty but filled with hope. Wang is also the director of "Beijing Besieged by Waste" (2012) which I haven't seen yet.

--Dennis Littrell, author of "The World Is Not as We Think It Is"

This documentary comes seven years after the first "Under Our Skin" from 2008. A lot has been learned about chronic Lyme disease since then not only in the United States but throughout the world. Director Anthony Abrahams Wilson follows some of the victims of chronic Lyme disease from the first "Under Our Skin" while bringing the viewer up to date on both what science has since discovered since and how the political battle between chronic Lyme disease deniers and others have changed. It appears that the deniers are losing.

As I wrote in my review of the first "Under Our Skin" what is apparently happening is this:

(1) some people get a chronic form of Lyme disease and, (2) the insurance companies don't want to pay for the long-term treatment required, and (3) their method for avoiding the costs is to deny the disease exists. (4) Additionally, the sufferers are accused of faking it or having it all in their heads.

Furthermore, doctors who treat (and apparently cure) patients with chronic Lyme disease are threatened with losing their medical licenses because the medical establishment believes that the long- term use of intravenous antibiotics is harmful.

What is obvious from this documentary and the previous is that the pain and suffering that victims have experienced is real and horrible. They are not faking it.

The documentary presents evidence that the infectious agent was able to hide from the immune system in biofilms within the body for months or years. I also believe that the infectious agent Borrelia burgdorferi disrupted or compromised the immune system of some people so badly that it took months or years for their bodies to recover.

By the way, the disease caused by Borrelia burgdorferi is only one of many similar diseases caused by tick bites throughout the world. Consequently, when doctors are not able to find the Lyme disease agent in a chronically sick person it may be the case they are looking for the wrong bug. Or it could be they didn't look hard enough. In the documentary, we learn that a Norwegian doctor diluted blood samples from patients which allowed him to see previously unseen infectious agents with a microscope.

By the way, one of the questions asked in this video is did "Lyme rage" have anything to do with the horrific murders at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut in 2012? Did Adam Lanza have Lyme disease? This documentary suggests that might have been the case; however, Adam Lanza had a long history of mental and social problems. Nonetheless it is possible since during autopsy he was not examined for Lyme disease.

I invite the reader to see the recent Australian documentary "Our Battle Ongoing: Lyme Disease in Australia" (2017) for more information. Interested people should also read relevant literature on the Web and reach your own conclusions.

--Dennis Littrell, author of "The World Is Not as We Think It Is"