Almost everything is made in China nowadays—everything. “I was brainstorming different factories to shoot in,” explains Jessica Kingdon, director of the documentary Ascension, about China’s industrial supply chain. “I thought about how China’s an innovator of A.I., and the first thing that popped up was ‘A.I. sex doll.’”
You might be surprised at the craftsmanship involved: Meticulously, women workers paint areolas rosy pink with their fingers, hand trim bikini lines, and mold the rubber with hot iron rods. (I immediately looked up the cost of such a premium sex doll after seeing how painstakingly handmade they are; the number can soar into the tens of thousands.) “It was the pinnacle of irony in the workplace,” Kingdon says. “You see all these women tenderly making these dolls for the most base of male desire, but at the same time for them it’s just a job.”
It’s the most memorable scene from one of the year’s most compelling documentaries, an image-driven, impressionistic portrait of Mainland China’s factories, workers, and consumers. Through a series of mesmerizing vignettes that ascend from the factory floors to the aspirations of the middle class and the hedonism of the newly moneyed elite, Kingdon’s feature directorial debut reveals sharp observations about labor, consumerism, and wealth both in the world’s second-largest economy and our own.
The New York–based filmmaker was drawn to China partly because of her heritage (her mother is Chinese) and the country’s drastic changes within mere decades. “A nation that used to be known as the world’s factory is now also one of the largest consumer markets in the world,” Kingdon says. “I’m interested in the philosophical question of the paradox of progress: what capitalism looks like, what progress really means. Seeing capitalism in a different context helps mirror it back to our own culture.”
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