For a pair of short films about Veja, the French shoemaker barely shows up. Instead, the lens in “Far From the Spotlight” and “Catadores,” which made their New York City debut at the Metrograph on Thursday night, stays completely trained on the people who are responsible for growing, collecting and assembling the raw materials that make up each iconic sneaker.
Veja is known for having a compressed supply chain that operates almost exclusively in Brazil. The two documentaries, which run less than an hour altogether, attempt to do the same. But their tones couldn’t be more different.
“Far From the Spotlight,” a moodier excursion by French-Canadian cinematographer Jérémie Battaglia, pulls viewers into the lives of Irisnete, a rubber tapper harvesting latex in the Amazon; Osvaldo, whose family has grown cotton for generations; Luênia, who leads several cooperatives of catadores, the Portuguese term for waste pickers; and Richard, a factory foreman.
Their ambitions and struggles are laid bare on the screen: droughts that nearly wiped out a family, a gang-involved youth that could have derailed a life of purpose, an epiphany that collecting what most view as trash can be recycled into something of value.
“Catadores,” helmed by Christophe “Chryde” Abric, another French director who has shot videos for artists like Alicia Keys, Justin Timberlake and Paul McCartney, takes a lighter, even comedic tone. Abric, who spoke to the audience afterward, said he was inspired by the couples interviewed in “When Harry Met Sally.”
In his take, members of the Atremar recycling cooperative in Três Pontas, a city in the coffee-growing state of Minas Gerais, speak directly to the camera, needle each other and reflect on what it takes to collect the castoff plastic bottles that become the recycled PET linings in each Veja shoe.
Veja has never craved attention. It eschews advertising and avoids the influencer economy. Instead of pouring millions every year into marketing, the footwear purveyor has opted to invest in its supply chain, paying its producers a premium on top of the market rate simply because it’s the right thing to do.
“Even if people don’t care, we care,” Sébastien Kopp, who co-founded Veja with his childhood friend François-Ghislain Morillion “as an adventure” in 2004, said at the screening. “We care about how much an organic cotton producer makes every month. We care about making Veja’s supply chain the best in the world.”
At the same time, it felt only right to feature what Battaglia described as Veja’s “everyday heroes.” Both he and Abric, working through Abric’s Paris-based cooperative La Blogotheque, were given complete freedom to tell the stories they wanted. And so they did.
“The idea was not to show numbers; the idea was not to market the sneakers,” Abric said. None of the people featured in the films were waiting for Veja to rescue them, he said. The brand didn’t so much help them as walk the same path with them.
“These are not actors; these are lives,” Battaglia agreed.
There’s a moment in “Catadores” where Evelini, one of the leaders of Atremar, cradles a large spool of thread. This is PET, spun from the plastic bottles that the cooperative spends hours each day diligently sorting for recycling. Soon they’ll make up part of a Veja sneaker. She laughs, her entire body shaking with delight.
“The people who think we’re garbagemen should see this,” she said.
