Recycled

The photos that the film is composed of are part of an archive of over half a million 35mm negatives salvaged by Thomas Sauvin, a French photography collector and editor, from a recycling plant in Beijing, where they were originally sent to be filtered for their silver nitrate content. For decades, Sauvin has been working on a project titled Beijing Silvermine, rooted in recovering and exposing the photographic records of the city’s residents from approximately 1985 until the advent of the digital photography hegemony around 2005.

Chinese visual artist Lei Lei selected over 3,000 photos to use in the animation of RECYCLED. The result is an audiovisual documentation and photographic portrait of a changing city, and its people, engaging with technological development and liberalization.