Girl Model on a Friday Night

Hello! Wow, is it already the end of the week? If you've been at school, cramming for exams, working your perfect little butts off (because hey! If ur not gonna tell it to yourself that your beautiful I surely am!) for littles payrolls, you just want to relax, make yourself some hot tea and a steaming bath with lavender salts and candles. But first, I don't want to be a party-pooper but I think what I'm about to show is important and valuable. If you're like me, you love fashion and explode of happiness every time a model flaunts it on the catwalk in awesome shoes and dress to match. And like me, are conscious about where your garments are made and what they are made of, and also about what happens to those beautiful ethereal beings that walk the catwalk like they own it. This is the trailer for a documentary called Girl Model and is described like this by the Abu Dhabi Film Festival.


In rural Siberia, Russian and American model scouts scour remote villages in search of teenage girls to satisfy the Japanese market's unquenchable thirst. For poor, pretty farm girls, the promise of work abroad signifies the rare chance for a new life. David Redmon and Ashley Sabin's provocative documentary explores this dark, seldom-seen segment of the modeling industry through two primary subjects.

Ashley used to be a model in the United States. Now she's a professional scout who is conflicted over the fact that her livelihood depends on recruiting the youngest girls possible based on promises that aren't always realized. Nadya is a 13-year-old country girl from Novosibirsk, Siberia, who embodies the particular kind of youthful innocence so highly sought-after in Japan. Hoping to help support her tight-knit family, she travels to Tokyo, but once there, she finds the frustrating reality of how jobs are booked is much different from what she expected.

Strikingly composed, Girl Model follows its subjects through a frustrating maze of casting sessions, clashes and contradictions. Redmon and Sabin juxtapose video diaries that Ashley recorded from her years as a model with her current life as a scout, revealing the precariousness and complexities of the business from both sides of the coin. As Nadya and the other young girls like her find themselves lost in a harrowing hall of mirrors, will they learn to navigate the modeling world, or wind up returning home in debt to their agencies?

This is very intriguing while hard to watch. I tried to get a hold of a copy of this documentary but its not that easy. Still I will search the endless realm of Internet to watch it in full and make an honest statement on the hypnotizing world of fashion models. Have a nice weekend :)