Movie Story:Opening in UK theatre’s on the 10th of February 2012 is the documentary film Girl Model, from film company Dogwoof, and directed by filmmakers David Redmon and Ashley Sabin. The film is a rather bleak look at the modeling trade between Siberia and Tokyo, told from the perspective of two parties. The main focus is on Nadya, a 13 year old girl from a poor Siberian family, who is looking at modeling as a way to help support her family, and model scout, and former model in Japan, Ashley. The film starts out with Ashley conducting a scouting session. This is where hundreds of young hopeful girls are lined up in front Ashley, in bikini’s, for her to cast her supposedly knowledgeable eye over them, deeming whether they are too short, mature looking, or more frightening, too fat. This opening gives you an instant sense that this is not going to be a pleasant tale of how these girls make millions and live happy lives. The haunting score, which has a numbing sense of foreboding is juxtaposed with the visual of this procession of young girls who all appear to be having the same mixture of emotions, nervous excitement, mixed with hope and expectancy. This scouting session is more of a human cattle auction. The girls are presented, judged, and those who fit the profile, whatever that may be, are chosen and shipped off for likely slaughter at the hands of the fashion industry. Nadya is one of the chosen ones from this session. She is 13 years old and has been groomed as a model by her family since she was young. This sounds like she is being forced into this against her will by a tyrannous parental unit, which is not true, Nadya wants to be a model and her parents are mearly nurturing and supporting her dreams. Ashley works closely with Tigan, who runs Noah Modeling agency. It is this agency that supplies Russian girls from the large Siberian area to Switch Models in Japan. Nadya is flown out to Japan on her own, at only 13 years old, with little knowledge of the country and no interpreter, causing her to struggle to communicate with anybody. All Nadya has is a promise, due to immigration laws, of $8,000 and two paid modeling jobs. She forms a friendship with a fellow Russian girl, Madlen, who is also on Switch’s books, and is looking for work. The pair attend casting after casting and are scrutinized and told to lie about their age, but they struggle to find work. Our other guide through this world is former model turned scout Ashley. Its obvious that Ashleys experiences as a young model in Japan have left her jaded and disillusioned. This is told not only through her current interactions with the filmmakers, but through videos Ashley had made herself when she first arrived in Japan as a 19 year old model. I’ll be honest, Ashley for me was an uncomfortable person to spend time with. I found her narcissistic tendencies, and her constant justifying of herself, to be deeply unsettling. Ashley seems to want you to think of her a some sort of martyr, who is forced to do this job because its all she knows how to do, this isn’t what she wants to be doing, but she has to. Nonsense. Ashley is doing this because it pays well, and it keeps her in a vacuous industry where her looks and self absorption are a valuable commodity. Towards the end of the film Ashley all but reveals that her scouting, and processing of these girls facilitates the sex trafficking industry as much as it does the modeling industry. I’m not suggesting that the people involved in the film are involved in that activity, but I’m sure they know that many of these girls who go to Japan will take up prostitution as a way to supplement their income while looking for work, and remember these girls are 13 and 14 years old, and we are constantly reminded of how in Japan they need to look young. Ashley strongly hints that she herself has possibly taken this path in her youth, and underneath all her self pity there seems to be a deeply unstable woman. Documentary film making is getting much more critical and commercial attention once again, this is meaning that films like this are being brought more to our attention and filmmakers like David Redmon and Ashley Sabin, are having their film made available to a wider market than maybe it would have been previously. This is proper documentary filmmaking, where the filmmakers are spending time with their subjects, and not just filling time with pointless talking heads. This is a very unsettling film, but I got the felling that if the filmmakers had scratched the surface a little bit more, they might have uncovered something even more troubling than what they present us with. What has to be considered though, is maybe they didn’t want to know whats under the surface. What we do know is Girl Model is documentary filmmaking at its most insightful, and unsettling. Girl Model is released in selected UK theatre’s from the 10th of February 2012 from Dogwoof pictures. Please follow this link for upcoming screenings and check it out if it close to you http://dogwoof.com/films/girl-model