When I’m talking about my work, I often get asked the same question. “Why?” “Why do you do what you do? Why do I travel thousands of miles to dangerous parts of the world to document life? I do it because I am fascinated and ravenously curious about the unknown. As a result I try to navigate the tight spaces of the world, and take away beautiful stories and images from them. The objective of my work is truth, to show what lies beneath the surface or out of sight.

I knew that this family would and should be the film.

The way that I started making this film was that I was in Nicaragua on assignment as a photojournalist for a European newspaper. A friend of mine who was doing another documentary in Nicaragua suggested that I go to La Chureca, the massive landfill in Managua. When I saw it for the first time I was speechless. My work had taken me to many places of abject poverty, but this seemed more extreme.

The days passed and I couldn’t shake what I had seen. I knew that I needed to learrn more about the denizens that spent their days sifting though the foulest of the foul to sustain life. I made the decision before I left Nicaragua to return the next month and begin making a film that would shine a light on what I had witnessed. My plan was to make a film about several people living there lives over the course of six months or so, edit and have a completed film within a year.

That was in 2011 and my plan got …revised. When I saw the four kids from this film gathering rotting fish carcasses for the first time, their togetherness, lightheartedness and ease in front of the camera, struck me. I knew that this family would and should be the film.

I wound up traveling to Nicaragua 11 times over seven years spending close to 300 days there in total. The final trip was in January of 2018. The result of which is nearly 200 hours of footage smelted down into a 1 hour 40 minute documentary that I could never have envisaged when I began.

This film is the work that I am most proud of in my life. The other thing that I often get asked is “What advice would you give to someone making a documentary for the first time?” To me ethics in documentary is paramount so my answer is always the same, “Tell the truth of the subject and not your own.”

Michael Dominic
Clean Hands