Girl Model (2011)

[Thomas Merino]

GirlModel is a 2011 documentary film following Ashley, a conflicted model scout recruiting young Siberian girls to model in Japan, and Nadya, a recruited 13-year-old who gets financially taken advantage of during her modeling work in Japan.[1] It was directed by David Redmon and A. Sabin. The film holds a 93% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.[2]

While receiving much praise for its subject matter, it left some critics wondering why the filmmakers didn't question the participants more thoroughly. Ty Burr of The Boston Globe writes, "It's a valid approach that doesn't yield as many dividends as the filmmakers hope. You sense there are dots left unconnected, a larger picture we're not seeing. Are the various agency heads exploiting the models on their own, or is there malevolent collusion? Who's making money and how? 'Girl Model' shows but doesn't investigate."[3] Jeannette Catsoulis of The New York Times writes, "filled with blind eyes and unspoken agreements, 'Girl Model' opens a can of worms, then disdains to follow their slimy trails."[4] Matan Uziel of The Glam Monitor writes, "This video gives one a very disturbing insight into how wealthy nations prey upon the poor in other countries. It's just a small slice of the exploitation that goes on. This 'meat' market, a prelude to sex trafficking, is creepy and ugly, and shocking, and we must do our best to stop it from happening." "The fashion industry may look glamorous from the outside, and it's deceiving."[5]

Gaaaaah!!! I wrote an essay a couple of months ago complaining about activist documentaries that put agenda before form. Girl Model is an excellent example of how to do activism right: The filmmakers allow the truly horrifying world of teenage modeling-- at least as it applies to Russian models in Japan-- to reveal itself through the journey of a 13-year-old (15, if anybody asks) as she travels to Tokyo, where agencies are always on the lookout for (very) young, fresh faces. The doc offers a subtly diabolical villain in Ashley, a former model who hated the job when she was a teenager, but has all sorts of moral equivocations for why it's okay to send other young girls through the buzzsaw. What's particularly striking about the film is how everyone in the industry seems to recognize that it's exploitative and awful, but at no level do they take responsibility for it. So the system just persists.

Directors David Redmon and Ashley Sabin not so much as speak to its subjects; these poor, dejected Siberian teens are walking around Tokyo literally having no idea what's going on, and it's potent stuff.

The most powerful moment comes from a young Siberian model who can't speak Japanese or English, who has no money and trails around for four hours completely confused. Depressing but weirdly enjoyable expos on the mistreatment of young girls, with a villain you love to hate in the form of ambivalent ex-model turned model scout Ashley Arbaugh, always willing to blame someone else, and that's what elevates this documentary to higher ground.

This is a documentary about a poor siberian family (let's say kind of forced) selling their underage naive girl to some unknown japanese people who think that QUOTE you can't be young enough UNQUOTE and a highly traumatised psycho ex-model who work selling the meat of girls like she was once to a ruthless market she, supposedly, despises. So, it's exactly as barren and unsettling and disturbing (she will be turning thirteen in October) and infuriating and gut-wrenching and soul-consuming (the measures clause, the debt scam, the exploitation, the solitude, the other more-than-obvious issues...) as you probably already think it's going to be. And then some. There's nothing truly explicit on the surface (of course, this is the kind of shit one hides deep down there) or anything like that, but there's not really even the need for it, this is still a pure horror movie.

Painful. Wonderful. Agonizing.

There are so many pathologies on display in this documentary about an exploitative industry. Ashley, the girl model who was ground in this system as a teenager, is now the adult guiding these girls and their families into a world of pedophilia and indentured servitude. With the various deceits and manipulations shown, as well as the power inequalities, it's hard to keep the phrase 'human trafficking' out of your mind.

We last spoke to documentary director Ashley Sabin back in 2007 for Kamp Katrina, the feature doc she co-directed with David Redmon. She joins us again to discuss their new documentary, Girl Model and how access can shape the form of a project from the earliest stages.

Told through the eyes of a 13-year-old Siberian girl and the American scout who discovered her, Girl Model follows a complex global supply chain of young girls sent abroad to seek their fortunes in the unregulated and often murky world of the modeling industry.

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Pubertal development is a nonlinear process progressing from prepubescent beginnings through biological, physical, and psychological changes to full sexual maturity. To tether theoretical concepts of puberty with sophisticated longitudinal, analytical models capable of articulating pubertal development more accurately, we used nonlinear mixed-effects models to describe both the timing and tempo of pubertal development in the sample of 364 White boys and 373 White girls measured across 6 years as part of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development. Individual differences in timing and tempo were extracted with models of logistic growth. Differential relations emerged for how boys' and girls' timing and tempo of development were related to physical characteristics (body mass index, height, and weight) and psychological outcomes (internalizing problems, externalizing problems, and risky sexual behavior). Timing and tempo are associated in boys but not girls. Pubertal timing and tempo are particularly important for predicting psychological outcomes in girls but only sparsely related to boys' psychological outcomes. Results highlight the importance of considering the nonlinear nature of puberty and expand the repertoire of possibilities for examining important aspects of how and when pubertal processes contribute to development.

In 2008, a survey found that a third of British schoolgirls aspire to become models - more than express an interest in any other career. This trend is the same around much of the world. In Siberia, a parade of bikini-clad, heavily made-up pre-teens queue up for the chance to be noticed by talent scouts. There's little they can do to boost their chances. The few who show poise and confidence are quickly discarded. "We're looking for a very particular type of girl," explains Ashley, a model herself. She says they need to be very young, "fresh", cute and vulnerable.

If this sounds like a meat market, it doesn't get better. This is the sort of film you should see at the cinema because owning the DVD could make you look like a paedophile. Films made by the scouts themselves, we are told, end up in the hands of some very unsavoury people. Nobody will take responsibility for this. Many of the children have loving parents, of course, but they are easily separated from them, and they tend to be poor families lacking the skills or resources to fight back.

Nadya is 13. She's excited by the chance to fly to Tokyo and make her fortune. She and her family fail to understand how dodgy her contract is until it's too late. But this is no fly-by-night operation. This is the core of the fashion business. Meanwhile, we hear about Ashley's own background in modelling and how much she hated it, until she realised she could get out by becoming an agent for other girls. Now she has a successful career, a big house, and the kind of medical problems that tend to result from years on a starvation diet.

When I was 13 I had a schoolfriend in the modelling business. She thrived on the attention but was clearly depressed. When she died of an overdose the local paper ran a front page story with a picture of her in a bikini, even her death sold with sex. Nadya's manager doesn't let any of 'his' girls go near drugs. If they lean that way, he scares them off by taking them to the morgue to see teenage corpses. But, says Ashley, many models drift into damaging lifestyles when they discover that they're no longer fashionable, they have no skills, and all anyone wants them for is their looks.

Girl Model is a scrappy looking film, parts of it apparently shot undercover, much shot in haste, but it certainly pins down the horrors of a dehumanising industry. In a way, its roughness serves it well, challenging the popular image of glamour and gloss and minimising the sexualisation of its young subjects. It successfully shows us vulnerability and despair without fetishising it the way conventional Hollywood narratives have done. It is honest and ugly and anybody with a catwalk-obsessed, ambitious daughter should take her to see it.

Despite a lack of obvious similarities between Siberia and Tokyo, a thriving model industry connects these distant regions. Girl Model follows two protagonists involved in this industry: Ashley, a deeply ambivalent model scout who scours the Siberian countryside looking for fresh faces to send to the Japanese market, and one of her discoveries, Nadya, a thirteen year old plucked from the Siberian countryside and dropped into the center of Tokyo with promises of a profitable career. After Ashley's initial discovery of Nadya, the two rarely meet again, but their stories are inextricably bound. As Nadya's optimism about rescuing her family from their financial difficulties grows, her dreams contrast against Ashley's more jaded outlook about the industry's corrosive influence.

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