By CAROL KINO

The photographer Vik Muniz often says that while he considers himself an American artist, his use of imagery owes everything to Brazil, where he was born and raised. “I’m a product of a military dictatorship,” he said recently at his New York gallery, Sikkema Jenkins & Company.

“Under a dictatorship, you cannot trust information or dispense it freely because of censorship. So Brazilians become very flexible in the use of metaphors. They learn to communicate with double meanings.” Certainly his photographs are filled with the visual equivalent of double entendres.

At first each seems to present a familiar image . But examine the picture up close, and it turns out to be made from chocolate syrup, which Mr. Muniz once dribbled across vellum to recreate Hans Namuth’s photograph of Jackson Pollock making a drip painting; or peanut butter and jelly, from which he molded a Warholesque “Double Mona Lisa.”

Mr. Muniz, a puckish 48-year-old, has been an art world fixture for more than a decade, and is now a celebrity in Brazil. In the last two years his traveling retrospective there has had record attendance.

He has also funneled much time and money to help street children, and recently was named a Unesco Goodwill Ambassador.

Now, as the star of “Waste Land,” a touching documentary that has won numerous film festival awards, he seems on the verge of reaching a broad er audience.

The film tracks the development of a 2008 series of monumental photographic portraits made from trash. Called “Pictures of Garbage,” they were created by Mr. Muniz with the garbage pickers of Jardim Gramacho, a dump just outside Rio de Janeiro that is one of the largest landfills in Latin America.

The film tells the story of Mr. Muniz’s efforts to help the catadores, as they are known , while giving them a new perspective on the world through art.

“I grew up poor,” Mr. Muniz says. “Now I’ve reached the point where I want to give back.” The catadores in the film soon reveal themselves to be as personality-packed as Mr. Muniz. They include Tiao Santos, president of the workers’ cooperative; and the scholarly Zumbi, who has educated himself by reading discarded books. Mr. Muniz transforms their images into classical portraits, which he models in his studio with their help, using garbage they have scavenged.

(They were paid for their efforts.) Tiao, for example, sits in a bathtub like David’s Marat, awash in a sea of filthy clothes and abandoned toilet seats. The accessibility of his work often leads art cognoscenti to dismiss Mr. Muniz, said Peter Boswell, a curator at the Miami Art Museum who organized a 2006 Muniz retrospective there.

(It toured the United States, Canada, Mexico and Brazil .) “Because Vik is so prolific, some people are tempted to write him off,” Mr. Boswell said. “But I think people who say that aren’t looking very deeply.” And it’s increasingly clear that in addition to his art, Mr. Muniz also wants to create new lives. Since the film’s release, some of the catadores have found new jobs, and Mr. Muniz and the filmmakers have donated $276,000 to the workers’ cooperative. At the end of the film, Tiao’s portrait sells at auction, and Mr. Muniz donates his $50,000 take to the cooperative.

And the catadores visit the Museu de Arte Moderna in Rio to see themselves in Mr. Muniz’s retrospective. “Sometimes we see ourselves as so small,” one tells reporters, “but people out there see us as so big, so beautiful.”