Mardi Gras: Made in China

Winner of twenty-one national and international awards, Mardi Gras: Made in China follows the path of Mardi Gras beads from the streets of New Orleans during Carnival – where revelers party and exchange beads for nudity – to the disciplined factories in Fuzhou, China – where teenage girls live and sew beads together all day and night. Blending curiosity with comedy, Mardi Gras: Made in China is the only film to explore how the toxic products directly affect the people who both make and consume them.

Accolades

• Sundance Film Festival - Nominated for the Grand Jury Award
• Winner of 21 awards
• Theatrically Released in the U.S.
• Curated by the Sundance Channel as one of the “Classical Festival Moments”
• New York Times Critics Pick by Stephen Holden

Reviews

• “Punchy documentary critique of globalization looks at the conditions in a factory in the Chinese city of Fuzhou where young workers make the beads showered onto revelers in New Orleans in exchange for baring their breasts at Mardi Gras.” The New York Times
• “Cleverly juxtaposes the apex of American bacchanalian excess with the sweatshop-like conditions that facilitate the fun.” Los Angeles Times
• “This is one of the best films I know about real (as opposed to op-ed) globalization. Please welcome it.” The Nation

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.”