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Unlikely Treasures, Compulsive Collectors

Saturday August 7, 2010 at 10 pm ET/PT on CBC News Network

"I hear the call of objects all the time. They talk to me and say 'take me home!'" So says New Yorker Marilyn Karp, one of several passionate, even obsessive, collectors featured in Unlikely Treasures, Compulsive Collectors, airing Wednesday, March 31 at 10 p.m. ET/PT on THE PASSIONATE EYE on CBC News Network.

They're the kind of collectors who don't want one of something, they want a hundred of them. In fact, Dorothy Globus, a curator at New York's Museum of Arts & Design, has hundreds of collections, from antique staplers to tea tags. Billy Mavreas from Montreal has a store that houses everything from old electronics manuals to swizzle sticks. And Kyle Supley is a collecting savant whose main interest is household electronics - everything from 60s clocks to wrist radios to platform shoes.

Is it just junk or is it art? Are they hoarders or archivists? Unlikely Treasures, Compulsive Collectors takes viewers inside the world of people who collect the unexpected and into homes that overflow with the unusual: from wedding cake ornaments to tiny toys to ceramic E.T.'s. The result is a 'roadshow' of the extreme, and an intimate exploration of the compulsion to collect and the urge to create order out of chaos.

The film also visits the City Reliquary in Brooklyn, where collectors bring their objects to be displayed for all to see; the New York flea market, where shoppers find things they never even knew they wanted; and Greensboro, N.C., where one woman's three-storey collection of items has been transformed into spectacular works of art. Unlikely Treasures, Compulsive Collectors introduces fascinating characters, getting inside their minds - and their drawers!

Unlikely Treasures, Compulsive Collectors is written and directed by Tally Abecassis and produced by Nathalie Barton (InformAction, Montreal) in association with CBC News Network.