Book Trailer

This teaser sets the scene for Trash and introduces the premise of the story. How has the director hooked the audience?

The Real Behala: Poverty in Manila

Author, Andy Mulligan, based Behala on a dumpsite in Manila.  

"When I was a teacher in the Philippines, just four years ago. I was sent to a dumpsite in Manila with a class of 11-year-olds: a trip designed “to see how the poor lived”. We got off the bus, and gawped at the mess. We smelled the smell, and gazed at the trash-pickers as if they lived behind bars and we were at the circus. 

It sounds shameful, doesn’t it? To visit a third-world dump to stare, and then go home again to TV and a three-course meal. That’s what we did, though – we stepped through the wardrobe for a moment into what was, to us, an upside down mad fantasy world of grimness.

But that’s how Trash came to be written." - Andy Muligan, The Guardian

Manila's Smokey Mountain Slum

Would you take a tour in a slum? What do you think of poverty tourism?