This purchase does not include a license of Institutional nor Public Performance Rights. Please click here for an Institutional-Use version.

“Filled with glancing light and happy faces, Marina of the Zabbaleen…fights hard to sweeten the misery of its surroundings. Its success is due in no small part to Rob Hauer’s eloquent cinematography, which creeps inside the mind of a child.”

“[The] film never loses its admiration for human resilience and childish imagination. Or for the tenacity of faith among those who seem most abandoned by their God.”

– The New York Times

Marína of the Zabbaleen is a cinematic documentary feature film that premiered at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival, where festival Artistic Director, Peter Scarlet, was quoted as calling the film "one of my favorite films of the festival." Among its other accolades, Marína won a Muhr Award at the Dubai International Film Festival.

The film explores the world of seven-year-old Marína in the Muqqattam recycling village in Cairo, Egypt. An impressionistic portrait of childhood and family, the film also tells the story the resourceful Zabbaleen, a Coptic Christian community of recyclers whose entrepreneurial waste management system produces one of the highest recycling rates in the world.

As reported in The New York Times, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere in May 2009, in reaction to the outbreak of Swine Influenza, the Egyptian government ordered the eradication of the country’s pig population. For almost a century, the Zabbaleen had raised pigs to consume the thousands of tons of organic waste generated daily by Cairo’s residents.

No people has felt the ramifications of the Swine Influenza pandemic more acutely than these Coptic Christians, whose way of life was devastated by the government-ordered eradication of the country’s pig population in 2009.

Torch Films and Blue Nile Productions are partnering to help the Zabbaleen survive their dislocation and reach sustainability once more —- and are allocating 10% of gross retail sales revenues of the film, including the revenues from the sale of this DVD, toward that effort.

With inspiration from the Zabbaleen’s thorough recycling system, distribution of the film is setting the global standard for an environmentally and socially responsible independent motion picture release, serving as a benchmark for green film distribution. Among other initiatives, our innovative DVD distribution reduces the carbon footprint of the process by more than 50%, on a per unit basis, from that of standard industry practice. Torch Films is utilizing the greenest DVD technology available, which uses 50% less polycarbonate plastic material than traditional DVDs, emits 50% less CO₂ in manufacturing, and eliminates the necessity of non-biodegradable bonder. Marína of the Zabbaleen is the first feature film to utilize this DVD technology. 100% soy-based inks are used for all printing, and DVD packaging is constructed from 95% recycled and 100% recyclable materials.

Please note: This DVD purchase does NOT include a license of Public Performance Rights or Educational Rights. This DVD may only be screened for private home use unless Public Performance Rights are purchased separately from Torch Films. For more information, please click here.