click for trailerThe New York Times review claims that "Whereas Burtynsky's photographs reveal human beings dwarfed by the massive industrialized landscape that surrounds them, Baichwal['s film] (much as Louis Malle did in his Humain, trop Humain) sheds a light on the tedium and monotony suffered by workers who are assigned small components of huge manufacturing processes, and must endure the repetitive work that it entails."
Here's the synopsis from the official website:
MANUFACTURED LANDSCAPES is the striking new documentary on the world and work of renowned artist Edward Burtynsky. Internationally acclaimed for his large-scale photographs of “manufactured landscapes”—quarries, recycling yards, factories, mines and dams—Burtynsky creates stunningly beautiful art from civilization’s materials and debris. The film follows him through China, as he shoots the evidence and effects of that country’s massive industrial revolution. With breathtaking sequences, such as the opening tracking shot through an almost endless factory, the filmmakers also extend the narratives of Burtynsky’s photographs, allowing us to meditate on our impact on the planet and witness both the epicenters of industrial endeavor and the dumping grounds of its waste. In the spirit of such environmentally enlightening sleeper-hits as AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH and RIVERS AND TIDES, MANUFACTURED LANDSCAPES powerfully shifts our consciousness about the world and the way we live in it, without simplistic judgments or reductive resolutions.
It is already out on DVD--though, as of mid-March, 2007--only in Canada. I've double-checked, and it is available already on the Canadian Amazon website.
[click image for Amazon Canada]I presume you could just order it there and have them ship it to you in the US (or anywhere else) if you weren't in Canada.
(Is it true that DVD's which play in Canada also play in the US? Please post a comment if that is not the case.)
Page for the DVD on Hello Cool Stuff website: link (they have a category for its "global connections," which, at the time I posted this, it said was "n/a").