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July 28, 2008
Carnivalesque Films Launches Today!
My favorite David Redmon story: he has a PhD in Sociology, and last fall taught a class at TCU on that topic as it relates to documentary film. He invited me to be a guest speaker one day, and the day I attended he was discussing Herzog. Towards the end of the class, he popped Even Dwarves Start Small in the DVD player; his students were summarily horrified, and he stopped the film after about 20 minutes. But later he wrote me to tell me that he felt so guilty about only showing them part of the work that he forced them to sit through the whole thing at the following class and discuss it afterwards. I'm sure they all hated him for it, but it's almost guaranteed that they'll never forget it.
I've had the great pleasure over the past year to get to know David and his partner in crime Ashley Sabin. We met at the Sidewalk Film Festival last fall and realized we were practically neighbors - which in the long term didn't mean much, because they were always off shooting a new project or wrapping up loose ends on an old one. New Orleans one week, Mexico the next. I've never met any filmmakers who travel and work as much as these two. And now they've found yet another way to keep busy, as they've added a distribution arm to their production company Carnivalesque Films. It officially launches today with the release of David's acclaimed documentary Mardi Gras: Made In China, which premiered at Sundance two years ago. His and Ashley's subsequent films, Kamp Katrina and Intimidad, will follow in short order, along with Tara Wray's Manhattan Kansas and (breaking out of the documentary mold) Ry Russo-Young's Orphans. You can read the entire press release here - and there's a fascinating, gloves-off interview with David over at Green Cine, entitled "Girls and Boys Gone Wild in the Context of the Global Economy."
David and Ashley both seem possessed by the same myopic drive to tell the stories that matter to them, and I'm excited to see this tendency extended to films that they themselves didn't make. Along with Benten Films, Carnivalesque is a boutique worth keeping both eyes on.
Posted by David Lowery at July 28, 2008 11:09 PM