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.
Keanu Reeves tells Kevin Buist–in very inhuman terms–what it’s like to be an alien getting in touch with his “humanness,” just before Kevin gets melted by a cosmic glare for being near Keanu at Comic-Con. So, what’s up with all these A-list Hollywood types going to a comic book convention? Kevin tells the story of his first Comic-Con visit.
Eureka! One of the great documentaries to slip through the cracks in 2004 was released this week through new DVD label, Carnivalesque FIlms. Mardi Gras: Made in China deftly examines globalization by stringing together life in a Chinese bead factory with the drunken, breast-baring party life of New Orleans during Mardi Gras.
Plus, a listener emails us two movies about female vigilantes. Can you guess what they are?
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.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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Keanu Reeves tells Kevin Buist–in very inhuman terms–what it’s like to be an alien getting in touch with his “humanness,” just before Kevin gets melted by a cosmic glare for being near Keanu at Comic-Con. So, what’s up with all these A-list Hollywood types going to a comic book convention? Kevin tells the story of his first Comic-Con visit.
