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.
That Redmon secures candid (if often less than enlightening) testimony from the intoxicated revelers of New Orleans is maybe a given, but the film’s real gift is the stunningly intimate material Redmon brings home from China. If his camera doesn’t flinch from the barely-legal bare breasts of Bourbon Street (the 72-minute theatrical version of the film is uncensored; the DVD also contains a shorter, sanitized version designed for educational use), Redmon is equally unsparing in pointing his camera at the barely-legal women who staff the bead factories.
A factory owner named Roger gives Redmon full access to his floor, his workers, and his management philosophy. The vast majority of Roger’s employees are teenage girls, who work so fast (they’re paid by the piece) that Redmon has to put a disclaimer on the screen to confirm that the footage hasn’t been sped-up after the fact. The materials used to make the beads would have a carcinogenic effect even if handled by workers with adult cardiovascular systems. Female employees are kept apart from males, and if they’re found mingling, they’re punished. On the whole, it seems like an odd environment into which to welcome a camera.
But Roger has nothing to hide––on the contrary, he insists that the work environment at his shop is exemplary compared to his competition. Of course, Redmon’s interviews with the actual workers suggest otherwise, but the real lesson here is not that working conditions in China are unjust, but that the standards of justice there are so radically different. That the efforts of young women are being exploited by older, marginally wiser men on both sides of the world is an irony to comes through the material without Redmon needing to spell it out.
Redmon has completed two films since Mardi Gras––Kamp Katrina, about a backyard tent city in hurricane-ravaged New Orleans, and Intimidad, which tracks a young family’s struggle to build a house in Northern Mexico; both films were co-directed by Mardi Gras associate producer Ashley Sabin––but Redmon’s unique style and attitude has been apparent throughout. Redmon and Sabin make films about the kinds of global and social issues that could easy scare off a casual viewer (Globalism! Poverty! Human rights! Corporate responsibility!), but these filmmakers approach their subjects without the finger waging or lecturing common to dreaded edutainment treatments of the same. Even when Redmon presents footage from the Chinese bead factories to New Orleans bead throwers mid-celebration, you don’t get the sense that he’s trying to shame the revelers as much as he’s trying to get into their heads, without guile or contempt.
The Mardi Gras DVD hit store shelves last week as the first release from Carnivalesque Films, a company set up by Redmon and Sabin in order to produce and release films which “explore how personal stories relate to complex social issues.” They’re one of several alternative distribution companies that have emerged over the past few years (DVD label Benten Films and download-to-own site Indiepix also come to mind) in an effort to bridge the gulf between the spoils of Hollywood excess and the asceticism of true independent film production. In relative terms, it’s an economic disparity almost as severe as the one depicted in Redmon and Sabin’s movie. Over the coming months, Carnivalesque will shepherd the DVD releases of a number of beloved film festival-feted indies, including Ry Russo Young’s SXSW-winning feature Orphans, and Low and Behold, a doc-drama hybrid set in post-Katrina New Orleans. For more information on these and other releases, check out the Carnivalesque Website.
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