A Child's-Eye View of Survival in a Village That Subsists on Trash.

Filled with glancing light and happy faces, ''Marina of the Zabbaleen,'' Engi Wassef's compassionate documentary about a poor community of garbage recyclers, 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 to turn a rat carcass into a shiny toy and mounds of rubbish into a mysterious kingdom. The child in question is 7-year-old Marina, who lives with her family and 30,000 zabbaleen (recyclers) in Muqqattam village in Cairo. Using a model that has been copied worldwide, Marina's family sorts and sells paper (others specialize in plastic or aluminum) under the watchful eye of a witchy neighbor and the constant threat of eviction. School appears to consist solely of biblical-theme videos (the zabbaleen are mostly Coptic Christian) and seems unlikely to advance Marina's dreams of becoming a doctor. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]