Fat Girl
A lonely teenage girl's obsession with her favourite Tik Tok star takes a dark turn as she descends into DIY cosmetics in an attempt to look like her.
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Filmmaker Statement

Fat Girl is a film which explores the self-hatred and internal decimation that occurs when women fail to live up to societal ideals of how they should look. In the 90s and 2000s, the media conditioned us to aspire to be as skinny and white as Kate Moss. With the advent of social media came more body types and a challenge to the traditional concepts of beauty, but while body positivity and diversity movements are doing a great job of widening this concept, the majority of the top influencers are still white and slim. Many are now also promoting cosmetic enhancements which are both normalised as aspirational and more widely available. And for those who cannot afford it, there are plenty of cheap do-it-yourself versions or illegal technicians to be found online. Nowhere did this new standard hit me harder than when I was sitting at a family dinner with my Kylie Jenner loving cousin, whose cosmetically enhanced lips proceeded to bleed all over the table. She, like most of her Gen-Z friends, could not afford real plastic surgeons but found a way to achieve the new beauty standard, even if it meant risking her health. Lexi, our central character, makes a similar bold choice. At the heart of Fat Girl is obsession with image and battles with an eating disorder which no woman (or indeed, man) is impervious to in today’s society. Whether overtly or covertly, we are constantly bombarded with images and videos of how we should look and what our lives should be like, and this has a way of penetrating our subconscious and views of self. This is something I found myself personally affected by through a battle with Binge Eating Disorder, which is both the most common eating disorder and the least well-known, partly because many women function and hide the condition so easily. While attempting to self- administer cognitive behaviour therapy, I realised that image and the desire for perfection was the driving force of the disorder. It was the daily failure to achieve a goal image - whether by eating something 'bad' or not looking as slim and toned as the girls on Tik Tok and Instagram - that would trigger a binge and begin the endless hamster wheel of frustration. It was during a post-binge battle with the internal self-loathing voices that the idea for Fat Girl came to me.

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Duration 15 Minutes
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