Kingdom of Animal

Language:  English

     

       

Kingdom of Animal is a one-shot documentary revealing the experiential sensations of factory laborers who process lobsters and fish inside three interconnected factories on the coast of Prospect Harbor, Maine. Our cinematic approach took three months to prepare before we recorded Kingdom of Animal (we have four different versions). We initially acted as trained ethnographers, relying on the skill of patience, participation, and experiential observation (for instance, we worked in various parts of the factory to understand the rhythmic sensations of redundant movement, interactions, touch and smell). We especially gave particular attention to the rhythms and patterns of workers, the timing of lunch-breaks, delivery of product, and methods of moving the camera to seamlessly flow from one space to the next. The result is a seventy-two minute single, moving shot with no edits or cuts. Our goal was to reveal an “order of things,” a structure of an experience, and find drama in the mundane experiences of situational work. The continuous long-shot allows for a continuation of experience and it makes the familiar unfamiliar (and vice versa). It also helps viewers recognize the boundaries and limitations of how documentaries are often edited to convey a message, expose an injustice, collapse time, and make a statement or social impact by sending a message. We certainly recognize the importance of these documentary goals, but we also hope a space exists for documentary to simply leave an everlasting impression through slow cinema. We made Kingdom of Animal to elide the three act structure, interviews, and external music and, instead, show an experiential story by using as few words as possible, ultimately relying on cinema’s most basic powerful elements: image and sound.

Screenings

 

                         

            

Filmmaking duo David Redmon and Ashley Sabin together produce, direct, photograph and edit critically acclaimed cinematic documentaries that have screened internationally in festivals and on television worldwide at Telluride, Sundance, Toronto, Cinema du Reel, Rotterdam, Visions du Reel, RIDM, MoMA, Telluride, and Viennale Film Festivals and on PBS, POV, BBC, CBC, DR, ARTE, and NHK.

Their body of work includes Kim’s Video whereby they play with the forms and tropes of various cinema genres as co-director David Redmon sets off on a quest to find a legendary lost video collection of 55,000 movies in Sicily. Four “animal ethnography” films based in the world of donkeys and funded by the Leverhulme Trust: Sanctuary (2017), Do Donkeys Act?(2017), Choreography (2014), and Herd (2015); two dream/memory cinema poems Sentient 1 & 2 (2015/2016); a 6 minute snowbound ballet mécanique, Neige (2016); a suite of U.S. post-industrialization themed films set inside three interconnected factories on the coast of Prospect Harbor, Maine: Downeast (2012), Night Labor (2013), and Kingdom of Animal(2012); a feature documentary about the labyrinthine world of teenage modeling in which a New York based scout recruits Siberian teenagers to the Tokyo model market Girl Model (2011); a film linking China and New Orleans through globalized manufacturing of cheap throwaway goods for American leisure pursuit, Mardi Gras: Made in China (2005) and two “carnivalesque” character driven films set in Louisiana Kamp Katrina (2007) and Invisible Girlfriend (2009). Lastly, set on the U.S. Mexico border, a longitudinal love story about family relationships and the meaning of “home” Intimidad (2008), which has been described as “a documentary fairytale of truly humbling proportions.”