From New Orleans to China, Siberia to Tokyo, and Boston to Maine, itinerant filmmakers Ashley Sabin and David Redmon have patiently and astutely observed the troubling realities of our globally connected economies.
Redmon, who studied sociology and originally hails from Texas, and Sabin, who was raised in Connecticut, have made a total of six feature films. But it’s with 2005′s Mardis Gras: Made in China, and a pair of more recent docs, Girl Model (2011)—which opens at the IFC Center in New York today—and Downeast (2012)—currently traveling the festival circuit—that the duo have thoroughly exposed the way international commerce exploits the people trying to survive within it.
Subtitled “Beads, Breasts, and Business: A Story of Globalization Gone Wild,” Redmon and Sabin’s first doc, Mardis Gras: Made in China, chronicles the links between those brightly colored baubles—exchanged between revelers during New Orlean’s most famous festivities—and the Chinese factories that make them.
Redmon traveled to the Tai Kuen plant in the town of Fuzhou, China, discovering the child laborers that make the beads—95% of whom are girls. As the smug factory owner admits, “It is easier for us to control the lady workers.” Such revelations come fast and furious from the tyrannical boss, who appears not only guiltless about his manufacturing prison camp, but shockingly proud.
The film carefully tracks the trajectory of the beads as they travel from China to their American distributor (“If they don’t put out, they don’t get paid,” says the callous businessmen, speaking of the Chinese workers thousands of miles away) to those bayou consumers who gleefully put out—whether by flashing their boobs, or performing other sexual acts—in exchange for the beads. When Redmon tells the Mardis Gras denizens where the beads are from, and how much the workers get paid (about 10 cents an hour), their responses vary—from outrage to denial to reluctant acceptance. But underlying all reactions is a sentiment voiced succinctly by one partier: “Don’t bring my conscience into this.”
The statement is equally applicable to the arguable star of Girl Model. Though the film specifically follows Nadya, a 13-year-old prepubescent Russian girl who is plucked from obscurity to become a model in Japan, the film becomes as much about Ashley, the 30-something American scout who helped discovered Nadya. A former model in the 1990s, Ashley echoes the denial of conscience seen on the streets of New Orleans. Though she recognizes the exploitative nature of the fashion industry (Russian mobster-businessmen are shown pushing young country girls into indentured servitude, possibly even prostitution) she keeps on participating, feeding more young flesh into the model grinder. While Nadya’s fate is certainly tragic and poignant, and the young girl’s travails in Japan yield just one published photo—ironically one that covers her face—Ashley’s story may be just as disturbing. She embodies the willful denial that global capitalism requires in order to function. But she’s a complex character, at once another victim in this cruel supply chain and also a crucial facilitator.
Not so coincidentally, Mardis Gras: Made in China and Girl Model traffic in their own collection of exploitable material; after all, both films show images of young half-naked girls. But they’re also highly cognizant of the way they’re presenting this imagery. The boob-flashing girls in New Orleans are more off-putting than titillating, and the long uncomfortable takes of young Russian girls in two-piece bathing suits, being judged by Ashley as if they were pieces of meat, are more oppressive than prurient.
Yet Sabin and Redmon’s critiques are not clear-cut. They are not suggesting that globalization is inherently destructive, but rather that it’s easily prone to corruption. The Chinese girls in Fuzhou, for example, are not simply exploited laborers but ambitious economic climbers, working towards a better life. Likewise, the aspiring Russian models may, in the rarest of circumstances, actually reach some level of success. But the system is also failing them.
This ambiguity is also on display in their latest feature, Downeast, a more sympathetic portrait of global economic turmoil that features no straightforward villains. Sabin and Redmon moved to the northeast coast of Maine (a.k.a. “downeast”) to document the shuttering of the last sardine factory in America. Two months later they discovered Boston-based entrepreneur Antonio Bussone trying to purchase the plant, hoping to transform it into a lobster processing facility and rehire the laid-off workers (an amiable bunch, many of them too elderly to find new jobs). This would seem to be a potential story of goodwill and progress, but the town’s local lobsterman turn out to be highly wary of the foreign-tongued Bussone, not to mention the government loans he hopes to harness.
If Downeast has an antagonist, he’s far less dangerous than those on display in the earlier films: grizzled town council chief and veteran lobsterman Dana Rice, who appears to unofficially reign over the small coastal town of Gouldsboro and eerily predicts Bussone’s downfall. But where do we pin the blame for the town’s struggles to survive in the new post-collapse economy? The overreaching Bussone, a family man who appears to just want to do what’s right by the community? The Canadian lobster industry? Gouldsboro’s powerbrokers, who would rather falter than let a European outsider “from away” take control of their livelihoods? Or most likely, the international Canadian-based TD Bank, which, arbitrarily, it seems, pulls out of Bussone’s business at the last minute?
Downeast is also the most beautiful film in Sabin and Redmon’s globalization trilogy. The filmmakers dwell on beautiful shots of the empty factory; the bustling hands of the elderly lady processors, as they pick apart lobsters; boats rocking into the old wooden docks, unloading herring for lobster bait. Patiently observed, the film captures the quiet rhythms of downeast Maine, evoking the melancholy of a place and people that may soon be obsolete. While Downeast is certainly the least sensationalistic of the three films, it may be the most haunting. Global capitalism, it seems, is taking us all down with it like a sinking ship.
Anthony Kaufman has written about films and the film industry for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Village Voice, and Slate. He is currently a regular contributor to Variety, The Wall Street Journal Online, Filmmaker Magazine, The Utne Reader, and writes the ReelPolitik blog for Indiewire.com.
