Girl Model

Despite a lack of obvious similarities between Siberia and Tokyo, a thriving model industry connects these distant regions. Girl Model follows two protagonists involved in this industry: Ashley, a deeply ambivalent model scout who scours the Siberian countryside looking for fresh faces to send to the Japanese market, and one of her discoveries, Nadya, a thirteen year old plucked from the Siberian countryside and dropped into the center of Tokyo with promises of a profitable career. After Ashley's initial discovery of Nadya, the two rarely meet again, but their stories are inextricably bound. As Nadya's optimism about rescuing her family from their financial difficulties grows, her dreams contrast against Ashley's more jaded outlook about the industry's corrosive influence.

Girl Model is a lyrical exploration of a world defined by glass surfaces and camera lenses, reflecting back differing versions of reality to the young women caught in their scope. As we enter further into this world, it more and more resembles a hall of mirrors, where appearances can't be trusted, perception becomes distorted, and there is no clear way out. Will Nadya, and the other girls like her, be able to find anyone to help navigate the maze, or will they follow a path like Ashley's, having learned the tricks of the labyrinth but unable to escape its lure?

Awards

Marc'Aurelio Award for Best Documentary in the Extra Section and EnelCuore Prize: Rome Film Festival

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.”