Greenpeace film recycles classic scene from American Beauty

It was one of those days when it’s a minute away from snowing and there’s this electricity in the air, you can almost hear it, right? 

"And this bag was like, dancing with me. Like a little kid begging me to play with it… And that’s the day I knew there was this entire life behind things.”

Taken from the famous scene in Alan Ball’s 1999 satire American Beauty, this is the point when budding filmmaker Ricky reveals why he videoed the plastic bag, explaining how he sees beauty in mundane things. 

In Greenpeace's American Beauty, McCann Santiago de Chile subverts the original film’s thesis on beauty by revealing the ugly truth about plastics – eight million tons of which reaches the ocean every year. It is part of #ChileSinPlásticos, a drive across Chile and Latin America to ban the use of disposable plastic. 

20 years on from the seminal film, we wonder where that bag is and where it will be in the future – considering that plastic takes more than 400 years to degrade.