Pretty Useless

Confetti is often encountered by chance, stepped on, found creeping in unexpected places. By paying attention to confetti as thing, produced to be thrown away, Pretty Useless questions notions of usefulness and wastefulness. The film juxtaposes confetti drifting through public spaces with its very production. In Treviso, Karnaval S.n.c. offers an official service destroying unused ballot papers on behalf of the Italian government. Alongside other bizarre paper scraps, ballots are fed to a die-cut machine and fragmented into small, unrecognizable pieces. Within each confetti bag, a multiplicity of material sources are remixed, intertwining stories of errors, abundances, surpluses, and discarded remnants. Exploring parallels of production and disposal, the film challenges the notion of voting as a pretty useless act.