Plastic Bag

Struggling with its immortality, a discarded plastic bag ventures through the barren remains of America as it searches for its maker.

Film Signature Image
Series
FUTURESTATES
Premiere Date
March 5, 2010
Length
19 minutes
Funding Initiative
Short-Form Series and Special Projects
Headshot of man
Director

Ramin Bahrani

Academy Award, BAFTA, WGA and Emmy nominee Ramin Bahrani is the Iranian-American filmmaker of Man Push Cart, Chop Shop, 99 Homes and The White Tiger. A Guggenheim Fellowship winner, his debut feature doc 2nd Chance premiered at Sundance and was released by Showtime. In 2010, Roger Ebert proclaimed Bahrani as “the director of the decade.”

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The Film

This short film by American director Ramin Bahrani (Goodbye Solo) traces the epic, existential journey of a plastic bag (voiced by Werner Herzog) searching for its lost maker, the woman who took it home from the store and eventually discarded it. Along the way, it encounters strange creatures, experiences love in the sky, grieves the loss of its beloved maker, and tries to grasp its purpose in the world.

In the end, the wayward plastic bag wafts its way to the ocean, into the tides, and out into the Pacific Ocean trash vortex — a promised nirvana where it will settle among its own kind and gradually let the memories of its maker slip away.

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