An Intimate Portrait

If Ashley Sabin and David Redmon's films are not stereotypical, even within the diverse documentary genre, it's because they aren't looking to use their subjects as vehicles for their own ideas.

They aren't trying to weave a symmetrical story, propose and question a hypothesis, or even separate themselves from the people in front of the camera.

Of their three released films, "Intimidad" is both the simplest and most difficult to describe.

After it premiered at Austin's South by Southwest festival on March 7, a man in the back of the theater asked Redmon and Sabin what political statement they were trying to make with the film, since the Ramirez family, the film's subjects, live in Reynosa, along the U.S.-Mexico border.

"I'm not going to answer that," Redmon replied. "Hopefully, this film gives you some things to think about without telling you what to think. If you have a lot of questions afterward, that's a good thing."

Essentially, "Intimidad" is the story of husband and wife, Camilo and Cecy Ramirez, and their young daughter, Loida. The film covers four years of their lives.

At the beginning of the film, 21-year-olds Camilo and Cecy have moved to Reynosa from Santa Maria, Puebla, to earn money and buy a small piece of land. They left Loida, 2 years old at the time, in Puebla with Cecy's family.

Eventually, Cecy and Camilo return to Puebla for a short trip and see Loida, who initially doesn't recognize them. The intensity of leaving Loida again for the thus far fruitless purpose of saving money is too much for Cecy, and she stays in Puebla.

After a time, mother and daughter return to Reynosa and together the family works toward buying a small piece of land and building a humble house.

The film would be simple, if not for the warm and emotional characters that involve the audience in their lives.

After a year, the family was given their own camera so that they could participate in documenting their lives when Redmon and Sabin were not there to film.

Redmon and Sabin met the couple when they were living in Reynosa for the summer, pursuing a film idea about Victoria's Secret bags and the maquiladoras they are made in.

Instead, they found Cecy, who was making Victoria's Secret bras in a maquiladora for a pittance.

As they began to get to know one another, both couples were full of love and youthful energy. Even without a common language, Cecy later said she knew she could trust them immediately.

"They were just incredibly comfortable with us filming them," Sabin said, who had never filmed a documentary before she began working on "Intimidad," though she helped to produce Redmon's film, "Mardi Gras: Made in China."

Sabin said her Spanish has improved over the years, but they have had to find their own language to communicate. Evidently, this involved a lot of smiling and pointing, and a lot of patience.

In February, before the film premiered, Sabin and Redmon returned to Reynosa, which they do as frequently as they can, to visit with the family and film Loida.

Sabin marveled at a notebook filled with Loida's homework - pages of neatly written phrases to practice her handwriting.

"I don't think she could write the last time we were here," Sabin said to Redmon.

The filmmakers are continuing to film the expressive 7-year-old Loida as she grows up in Reynosa.

This project could take decades, but unlike filmmakers who contain their subjects within tidy feature-length character arcs, Sabin and Redmon are simply following the lives of people they've invested in and who have in return placed their trust in them.

The filmmakers two previous projects, "Kamp Katrina," and "Mardi Gras: Made in China," made through their production company Carnivalesque Films, are linked by the ongoing story of Miss Pearl, who they follow before and after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans.

Another film in production follows one of the subjects of "Kamp Katrina," Charles, who is in love with Joan of Arc, and another project collects the stories of three subjects who were lost in the editing process of previous films.

But the integrity with which the filmmakers preserve the content of their subjects' characters - over time and distance - is not without its own setbacks.

In a sense, Redmon says his life with Sabin parallels Cecy and Camilo, matching their love for one another with their inability to afford a home of their own. They currently live in Mansfield, Texas, Redmon's hometown.

"We basically use the money from each film to fund the next film," Redmon said. He meet Sabin in Boston when she was attending Emerson College.

Paradoxically, Redmon and Sabin's involvement with the deep and sometimes devastating emotional lives of their subjects over the years has had the effect of numbing Redmon.

He's cried just once in three years, he said, a strange side effect perhaps of living with the horror of Hurricane Katrina's aftermath in New Orleans for several months as the couple filmed a group of storm survivors, many of whom were drug addicts.

Last October, a New York Times photograph of flood victims in Tabasco, Mexico, carrying their belongings overhead as they waded waist-deep in contaminated waters recalled Katrina, instigating the only tears he's shed in that time.

"It was like, ‘Great, another family whose home has been destroyed. Just another family who has lost everything.'"

Sabin and Redmon's films are most extraordinary for escaping this anonymity of suffering.

All of their films explore shared themes, whether they are poverty, mental health, addiction, globalization, or family, but they do so with unflinching attention to the specificity of the individual.

In so doing they are able to lift those subjects out of potential stereotypes and elevate them to the unpredictable terrain of the real world.