Plastic People: Hot Docs Cinema to Bid Au Revoir With An Alarming Look at Our Bodies' Plastic Bits

By Jim Slotek

Rating: B-plus

You can’t accuse Ben Addelman and Ziya Tong’s documentary Plastic People of misleading advertising. We are, apparently, plastic people.

If you come away with nothing else from this globetrotting doc about the 1.5 billion water bottles bought daily worldwide (yes, that’s “billion”), and the burgeoning industry still pumping out scores of varieties of human-invented polymers, two graphic surgical scenes are likely to stay with you.

In a hospital in Ankara, a large tumor is seen being removed from a patient’s brain. On examination, several tiny bits of plastic are found.

Switch to a hospital in Rome and the caesarian birth of a baby. A similar amount of plastic bits are found in the placenta. In a random sampling of mother’s milk from about 60 patients, the doctor says, he discovered plastic in more than two-thirds.

Science writer Ziya Tong - who basically hosts this Canadian doc that premiered at the South by Southwest Festival - goes the participatory journalist route herself. At one point, she offers up a blood sample, which turns out to contain more than a dozen plastic fibres.

The movie touches on what this means medically – cancers, hormone inhibitors, etc. But the real meaning of it all, we’re told, won’t be known until the generation that absorbs plastic in utero grows up to manifest symptoms.

There is an almost hopeless, too-late feel to the scope of the ocean of plastic bits we turn out to inhale and absorb (let alone what’s absorbed by our fellow creatures). It’s disheartening being introduced to Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley,” home to more than 200 chemical plants pumping out chloroprene, neoprene and polyvinyl chloride (PVC), and the worrisome existence of the people who live practically next door.

It’s all for the good of the economy, after all.

There’s even a suggestion that the move towards electric cars may lead petrochemical companies to ramp up their surplus towards increased production of various plastics.

At its end, Plastic People tries to strike an optimistic note, with stats about the countries that have implemented directives toward limiting plastics, and a feel-good snippet about a Philippine river once clogged and now clear after a massive plastic cleanup effort.

But cheering up is a bit of a tall order after 80-or-so minutes of the global Frankenstein’s Monster we’ve blithely, and even enthusiastically, created.

Next to the surgical scenes, Plastic People’s most memorable moments are the atomic-era archival bits about our once passionate love affair with the newly created compound materials that were changing society. Women are seen enthusing over nylon stockings that replace the more expensive and less durable silk ones. A front-page newspaper article cheerleads the “disposable society” that will take the drudgery out of domestic life.

Back then, more thought was put into nuclear waste than in what would happen to artificial substance that degrade into almost microscopic bits, but never disappear.

Plastic People is getting a national theatrical release that hits Toronto, Tuesday, May 28 at the Royal Theatre, and ends June 11 at the Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema.

As a sad footnote for documentary fans, that last engagement is to the be final screening at the financially-troubled Hot Docs venue before it closes its doors for an ominous “hiatus.”

Plastic People. Directed by Ben Addelman and Ziya Tong. Playing at select theatres, including Toronto’s Royal Theatre (May 28), The Revue (June 2) and the Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema (June 1, June 11), as well as Vancouver’s Lochmaddy Studio Theatre (May 29) and St. Catherines’ The Film House (June 25 and June 30).