Documentary
“Just say fat,” implores Aubrey Gordon, blogger-turned-author and co-host of the podcast Maintenance Phase. Through her initially anonymous, candid and hugely popular blog Your Fat Friend, which began in 2016 with a viral manifesto essay, Gordon wants to change the conversation around fatness. Drawing on her lived experience as a queer fat woman, she asks society to embrace it as an alternative way of being – rather than as a taboo subject to be downplayed, ignored or centred on bodies viewed as cautionary tales – challenging the fantasies peddled by a diet and wellness industry worth $26 billion a year.
This isn’t a film about body positivity, as co-opted by corporate brands. It’s about fat justice and no-limits liberation, a philosophy that has brought Gordon a global audience, a book deal and threats against her life (this last evidencing just how profoundly some people experience fatness and the self-esteem of fat people as dangerous, whether to their understanding of the world, their sense of themselves, or both). “My aim,” she says, “is to provoke people to question the things they always thought were true.”
British documentarian Jeanie Finlay’s (Seahorse) engaging, eye-opening and emotive film – winner of the Sheffield DocFest Audience Award 2023 – follows Gordon as she gives up her anonymity and as she further interrogates her relationships with food, her body, family, and society at large.
This film will play with subtitles for the Deaf or hard of hearing (SDH) and audio description (AD) at Storyhouse and online.
