Heavy Metal is an art documentary about the practices of a metal processing factory in southern Spain. The unnamed factory is family owned and operated, and follows a humane code of labor conditions. The workers never work more than seven hours per day, often four days per week. The factory regards the health, safety, happiness and longevity of its workers. Why? Because the work is hard, dangerous and loud. And yet the factory is thriving, earning enough to maintain these labor practices and pay the employees fairly. This film offers insight to the work the laborers do, and to the rarely seen shapes and colors of metal recycling.
Additionally Heavy Metal is about music. Some of the workers at the factory are guitarists. The film uses the image of the guitar, strings made of metal, to highlight that the workers who do this job, also work with their hands to make other sounds. As is said by the guitar playing worker who also operates the metal claw, “Initially I get carried away by the mechanical movements of the hand. But after a couple of minutes, I manage to connect with what it really conveys to me, which is the connection to the earth, the sound of life that is nothing more than an expression that being here is good for something.”
Cuyler Ballenger is a video artist whose works incorporate documentary filmmaking and contemporary visual practice. Ballenger employs elements of personal documentary to open up larger themes such as addiction, family, and labor. In Houston his work has been supported by Lawndale Art Center, Houston Cinema Arts Society, and Houston Arts Alliance.
