Invisible Girlfriend

Charles is in love with his invisible girlfriend, Joan of Arc, so he decides to ride his big red bicycle 400 miles from Monroe through rural Louisiana to find her in a New Orleans bar. Along the way, he encounters a farmer, a witch, a tin man, and a man who honors the dead. Working within the tradition of creative non-fiction, Invisible Girlfriend is a Southern tale that transcends literal interpretations of images in order to open up rich, loamy textures of humor and drama. The cinematography is startling in its intensity and violent beauty, representing an optical trope that offsets the desperate love that Charles sets off on his journey to find.

Awards

• Ripping Reality: Hot Docs Film Festival
• Ron Tibbett Award for Excellence in Film: Magnolia Film Festival
• Best Humanities Themed Documentary: Cinema on the Bayou
• Best Directing: Indie Memphis Film Festival
• Best Feature Film: Different From What Film Festival

Reviews

• “Invisible Girlfriend is a textbook example of what can result when savvy documentarians fortuitously connect (or, in this case, reconnect) with an interesting subject at precisely the right moment.... Final scenes are genuinely heart wrenching.” Joe Leydon, Variety
• “A surprising and profoundly compassionate road trip about an America struggling to get back on its feet, with filmmakers Ashley Sabin and David Redmon working at the intersection of Flannery O'Connor Avenue and Werner Herzog Boulevard.” Ty Burr, The Boston Globe
• “The intrepid Sabin and Redmon unmitigatingly open themselves up to the rich, loamy textures of human life and drama that make most of us run in the other direction or, at the very least, flat out ignore.” Pamela Cohn, Still in Motion
• “A surreal, Wizard of Oz-esque journey through one of America's most vibrant landscapes, with characters you couldn't make up and a climax that is flat-out unbelievable. Redmon and Sabin are America's answer to Werner Herzog, delivering films that transcend the realms of fiction and non-fiction to reach a new state of truth.” Michael Tully, Hammer to Nail

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.”