You’ll believe a garbage truck has soul—really. In the documentary Trash Dance, which opens this year’s Just Film Festival (formerly the Vancouver World Community Film Festival) at Langara College on Friday (February 28), Austin, Texas, sanitation workers commandeer an enormous abandoned airstrip and turn it into a luminous spectacle of music, motion, and light, with human and machine locked in a fluid pas de deux.

And it’s absolutely beautiful.

“I was even surprised at how moving it was,” says filmmaker Andrew Garrison, calling the Straight from Austin. “You know, I’ve truncated time and you don’t see the whole performance, but I was trying to get across that sense. I did break down in tears when the crane solo happened at the performance. And people did jump to their feet. It was quite amazing.”

The “crane solo” is exactly what you think it is—if you’re imagining the extendable arm of a garbage truck performing something like an elegant Egyptian hand dance in the sky. The machine operator is a heavy, middle-aged gentleman who confesses that the whole idea sounded nuts when choreographer Allison Orr showed up at the city trash depot and said she needed volunteers for a dance project, of all things. Twelve months later, after working alongside the department’s 215 employees, she had her unlikely troupe.

Capturing Orr’s charm was easy for Garrison, who recognized the “makings of an amazing politician” in the endlessly engaging choreographer. Mercifully, Orr has put her talents to much better use than that, founding Forklift Danceworks in 2001 and setting out to create public art from the material around her. She’s worked with Austin’s firefighters and Venetian gondoliers, among others, but 2011’s Trash Project was her biggest undertaking and her greatest success.

There’s little in the way of conflict in Trash Dance. The drama comes from our hope that Orr and her enthusiastic students can actually pull the damn thing off. But Garrison introduces a subtle note of commentary as the sanitation workers, a hard-working and dedicated bunch, open up about their back stories. They all have second jobs. “Their pay is not great pay. Down at the basic operator level, it’s a low start and it doesn’t get very high,” the director says with a sigh.

We also get wind of an Austin-based, right-wing radio show that attacks the funding of the Trash Project—erroneously, as it turns out. “I can’t argue that it’s the importance of art because that doesn’t mean anything to them,” Garrison offers when asked what he’d say if given the chance to defend Orr’s work to the average Bill O’Reilly–shaped blowhard. “The notion that people coming together—stepping up to do this thing together—is actually transforming in a way that’s literally ineffable… I cannot explain why this is, but it happens when you make something, and when you make something with other people,” he says. “It’s what human beings do, and when we do that, it changes everything.”

Trash Dance screens with 2013’s Oscar-winning short, “Inocente”. Festival programmer Erin Mullan told the Straight that “both films represent one of the themes in this year’s program: the power of art to transform the lives of people on the margins. In addition to the opening-night films, we have a program on Sunday afternoon of three films—Art From the Streets, Music for Mandela, and Sweet Dreams—that all explore the connections between art and social justice.”

More info on the two-day Just Film Festival is at www.justfilm.ca.