Night Labor

Night Labor follows Sherman Frank Merchant, a forty-six year old 6'6" Downeaster during his transition from an independent and rugged clam digger by day to manning a factory at night. With his white smock, arsenal of knives, and signature black beret, Sherman performs the tasks of preparing and arranging tools for the day laborers who arrive to their 6am shift.

Night Labor is an intimate experience of what the film critic J. Hoberman calls “situation documentary,” a blending of minimally structured narratives with documentary moments and long takes that elide conventional narrative and plot in favor of mood, lyrical entertainment, and banal mystery.

Night Labor is a beautifully photographed story that fuses drama and tension in the mundane sensory experiences of work, ultimately relying on cinema’s most basic powerful elements: image and sound.

Awards

Special Jury Prize, Visions du Reel

Best Canadian Feature, Special Jury Prize, RIDM

Special Mention, Docudays

Special Mention, Cinema on the Bayou

Press

"Night Labor, by David Redmon and Ashley Sabin (Girl Model, Downeast), is a collection of vignettes from the life of a rangy, raw-boned Mainer who leaves his hermit’s hollow to work the lonely night shift at a lobster processing plant. Save for the sound of its subject’s Popeye-like under-his-breath muttering as he goes about his rounds, the film is almost entirely free of dialogue, though it has a simple but totally engrossing, process-oriented hook—watching the preparation of a factory floor, we see the readying of mysterious implements whose use will only become evident at the film’s climax." Artforum

"Though it chronicles a quotidian workday, every shot of David Redmon and Ashley Sabin’s Night Labor is an opportunity for revelation." Film Comment

"Night Labor is a lingeringly powerful film – the perfect capper to an enjoyably discombobulating day at RIDM." Adam Nayman, POV Magazine

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.”