On the surface, Mardi Gras looks like good, cheap (if not always clean) fun. On the internet, $17 will buy ten dozen Mardi Gras beads––roughly what a group of revelers might be expected to toss as bait for tossed-off tops on Bourbon Street in a single hour. This ritual––one part libido, one part alcohol, one part peer pressure, one part historical precedent––leaves no room for practical realities, harsh or otherwise. So maybe it’s not much of a surprise that when sociologist-turned-filmmaker David Redmon went to New Orleans in 2004 and asked the question, “Where do you think the beads come from?” none of the young party people he encountered knew that $17 American dollars is enough to pay the salary of the average underage worker who makes Mardi Gras beads in sweatshop conditions in China for weeks
Yes, there’s a secret, hidden cost to this tradition-steeped debauchery: a complete divorce between the economics, the social realities, and the moral ambiguities that make production of a commodity possible, and the relative wealth, privilege and, well, moral ambiguities that transform that product, once transported across oceans and continents, into something virtually worthless.
With his 2005 documentary Mardi Gras: Made in China (a Sundance Grand Jury Prize nominee which just came out on DVD), Redmon manages to bridge these disparate worlds by spending time in both New Orleans and Fuzhou, China, and smuggling information from one locus to another, using his own curiosity to enlighten the hand on one end of the global marketplace as to what the other hand is doing.
David Redmon’s Mardi Gras: Made in China comes out on DVD today, as the first release from Redmon and Ashley Sabin’s DVD distribution gambit, Carnivalesque Films. I returned home from San Diego last night to find a screener waiting for me, and though I haven’t had a chance to watch it yet, as a big fan of Redmon and Sabins later films, Kamp Katrina and Intimidad, I’m excited to see it. I’m even more excited after reading this GreenCine interview with Redmon, where he shares some of the secret history of the Bourbon Street party scene. An excerpt:
The first such recorded event in exchange for beads was in 1978, and it was actually the showing of the penis…The women first started yelling at the men to show theirs, and initially this was called weenie-wagging (men dangling their weenies from balconies). After that is when the beads became big - and became a commodity that could be marketed as a kind of commerce - in exchange for nudity.
Oh, equal opportunity objectification. What became of you?
Exciting news from David Redmon and Ashley Sabin, co-directors of a couple of our favorite recent docs, Kamp Katrina and Intimidad: they’re expanding the purview of their production company, Carnivalesque Films, in order to start distributing DVDs. Their first release will be their own film, the 2005 Sundance premiere Mardi Gras: Made in China, and it’ll be available, to quote David, “everywhere,” on July 29. In the coming months, Carnivalesque will distribute two festival favorites: Ry Russo-Young’s SXSW Special Jury prize winner Orphans, and The Holy Modal Rounders: Bound to Lose. The Mardi Gras trailer is embedded above; we’ll pass along more details on Carnivalesque’s upcoming releases as we get them.
I don’t really know what the TakeApart blog means when they say, “with the times of today mirroring the times of the film, [Zabriskie Point] couldn’t be more relevant”––the movie’s such crazy hippie fantasy, I can’t imagine a time when it was ever relevant––but I’ll thank them for pointing to the clip of its beautiful but vacant stars sitting next to Rex Reed and Mel Brooks on The Dick Cavett Show.
Victoria Large at Not Coming to a Theater Near You, on David Redmon and Ashley Sabin’s “outsourcing” of some of the shooting of Intimidad to their subjects: “The technique of allowing the subjects to help author their own story feels appropriate to Intimidad, not only because it allows for the intimacy of the title, but also because it reflects one of the most striking things about the film: that it is about those who take action and are not merely acted upon.”
David Hudson alerts us to the Invitation to the Dance blog-a-thon, which began at Marilyn Ferdinand’s blog yesterday. I’m thinking about taking a crack at how the dynamic of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers is inverted in Dirty Dancing, but I’m open to other suggestions if you’ve got any.
I haven’t seen David Redmon and Ashley Sabin’s first film, Mardi Gras: Made in China, but I’m impressed by the way the filmmakers, across second and third features Kamp Katrina and Intimidad, have begun to establish a voice not just through subject matter, but through a distinct visual style. There are few trademarks that you can now expect from a Sabin/Redmon production: eerie video, shot at night on a low shutter speed; an exceedingly intimate access to subject; and a mounting sense of dread as the realization hits that when the crisis inevitably comes down, the camera is going to put us right in the middle of the shit. In Intimidad, the crises seen on screen are mostly emotional and confined to a single family, but they’re spawned by the kind of larger crises of economic disparity and the hopelessness it engenders that propelled Kamp Katrina. The title literally translates to “Privacy”, and there’s a double connotation there: it’s a film about a couple’s struggle to maintain familial intimacy whilst battling a seemingly impossible economic system in the quest for private property. …Read more
Above, you’ll find the trailer for Intimidad, David Redmon and Ashley Sabin’s second SXSW premiere in two years, after 2007’s devastating Kamp Katrina. Shot on both film and video over the course of four years, Intimidad documents a young couple’s life on the Mexico/Texas border. Screening as part of SXSW’s Lone Star States program, the film premieres at the Alamo South Lamar on Friday, March 7, at 10pm. Below, Ashley and David answer the 4 Questions We’re Asking Everybody.
Tell us about your movie. Who did you work with, why did you make it? Give us the reductive, 25-word or less, “It’s like [pop culture reference a] meets [pop culture reference b]!” pitch, then explain what the quick and dirty sell leaves out.
Ashley Sabin: David Redmon and I have been working on this film for about 4 and a half years. We started making the film as a Victoria Secret factory film. It’s through the organic process of watching the footage and finding the story that we realized the film was not about the factory and more about everyday intimacy told by the main characters, Cecy and Camilo. It’s also the first film I ever shot so it’s interesting/nerve wrecking to see the growth in my own filmmaking development. We left cameras with Cecy and Camilo and they essentially became part of the crew. We started filming their daughter - Loida - when she was 2 years old up until now (she’s six years old). Watching her grow is one of my favorite parts of the movie. We might something similar to 7up where we film her for the next 10, 15, or 20 years and see where she ends up (but it depends on her and her parent’s decision). She is an amazingly charismatic little girl!
David Redmon: Ashley and I worked together, but the family in the film also worked on it. It’s about a family trying to stay together to accomplish their dream of buying land and building a house in Reynosa, Mexico.
Do you have a day job/a non-filmmaking occupation that raises money for your filmmaking efforts? Tell us about it.
AS: David and I are lucky enough to not have to get a second job this month. However, I would consider our second job distribution. We have put out our first two films, Mardi Gras: Made in China and Kamp Katrina. It’s a lot of work and adds a whole other layer to our relationship with our films but I find it very rewarding.
DR: Yes, we travel to colleges, show our films, and discuss them with students and teachers. I’d like to finish the book I started a few years ago.
Have you been to SXSW before? If so, tell us about your funniest story from the experience. If not, what are you looking forward to re: the festival and/or the city of Austin?
AS: We were at SXSW last year with our feature documentary, Kamp Katrina. Everything about the festival was amazing and great. We met some remarkable people who we still stay in touch with and saw some great risk taking films. I guess the only speed bump was when I got the nerve to walk up to an unnamed film distribution guy and give him the “pitch” of our film and my card and he looked at it and passed it off to the woman next to him. What a sly guy! Both shocked and mortified I walked away. This event reaffirmed why I do self distribution and love it!
DR: Yes, we ran into a crazy man who spontaneously took us to four different all night parties in the pouring Texas thunderstorm rain, until we ended up at a diner at 5am and finally found out his name: Michael Lerman [co-director of SXSW 2008 feature Natural Causes].
Let’s get hypothetical: You’re on death row. The night of your execution, you’re allowed to watch any two films of your choice. What would you pick for your last-night-on-Earth double feature?
AS: I always get hung up on these questions because days later I always want to add on more but I think that if my life were to end I would need something comforting so I would resort to childhood favorites, Labyrinth and Princess Bride, or and maybe if I got a third Harry and the Hendersons. These three films my younger brother and sister and I would watch over and over again. It’s partially why I have a serious but rather silly phobia of Bigfoots. I guess to confront that phobia I should go see the doc on Bigfoots but I would need to do with David by my side.
Ashley Sabin co-directed a new documentary shot in cinema verité style (no narration, no interviews) to get beyond the helicopter footage of hurricane Katrina. In Kamp Katrina, they take their cameras into a backyard-turned-refugee-camp on the ground. Paul talks with Sabin about the film in a restaurant at SXSW 2007.
David Redmon’s Mardi Gras: Made in China comes out on DVD today, as the first release from Redmon and Ashley Sabin’s DVD distribution gambit, Carnivalesque Films. I returned home from San Diego last night to find a screener waiting for me, and though I haven’t had a chance to watch it yet, as a big fan of Redmon and Sabins later films, Kamp Katrina and Intimidad, I’m excited to see it. I’m even more excited after reading this GreenCine interview with Redmon, where he shares some of the secret history of the Bourbon Street party scene. An excerpt:
