Mardi Gras Made in China

With 177 films or so playing around town last week, one would think that I'd not be watching much television. I must admit that I did watch a modicum. The Sundance Channel showed Mardi Gras Made in China which was shown at the festival but I didn't have a ticket for it.

The movie looks at Mardi Gras beads. We find out that many of them are made in China. Scenes of the factory floor and the lives of the people who work there are juxtaposed against the revelry of Mardi Gras. The workers are mostly young women who are drawn to the factory by the promise of earning a good wage to support the families they left behind. They work long hours for what is to us Americans, a paltry wage. Their social lives consist mostly of hanging with co-workers in the factory's dormitories. Across the Pacific, their counterparts flash their breasts at total strangers for the beads.

Mardi Gras has a message, to be sure. Testimonies of the workers run counter to the claims of the factory's owner. Some of the revelers in Nawlins are very direct about their apathy towards those who make the beads - they get drunk and have fun and that's all that counts. Plus we are shown how the vast majority of the beads end up as refuse.

However, director David Redmon doesn't shout at the viewer. Or, at least, he doesn't come across as standing atop a soapbox telling us Americans that we're all self-centered wasters of the earth's resources. While this element is there, it's a bit subdued. The part of the film which really cut to the heart of the video's style was when the factory workers, who had no idea what the beads were for, are shown pictures of Mardi Gras. They are told that woman reveal their breasts in order to get the beads. Likewise, partiers are shown footage of the working conditions in the factory and told what the workers' lives are like. For me, the movie was more of an attempt to get viewers to consider their lives rather than to chastise them. Instead of interviewing people such as economists and labor rights activists, Redmon stuck to just those folks involved in making and using the beads. I think that this stylistic decision was very important in keeping it from sounding like a soapbox tirade. There were no appeals to authority to make pronouncements and instead he let the people speak for themselves.