This award-winning short film about eating disorders, You Are Beautiful, started off as a school project.
And the girls who created it, are only 13-years-old.
Olivia Maloney and Cameron Dreyer are in 7th grade – which makes them well-placed to make film about body image pressure and insecurities. High school, for many people, if when the curvature of your stomach and the size of your upper arms and the circumference of your thighs suddenly seems to matter a whole lot more than it ever did before.
But Maloney and Dreyer have managed to create a film that not only resonates with their age group – but many grown women who have ever suffered from eating disorders.
The short won Best Student Film at the 2013 Colorful Colorado Film Festival, and then went on to win the middle school category in the My Hero International Film Festival.
It is a simple, powerful film – with a simple, powerful message.
You are beautiful.
And you shouldn’t hurt yourself, to change who you are.
If you need help or support you can call the Butterfly Foundation support line on 1800 334 673 or the Eating Disorders Helpline number on 1300 550 236.
Top Comments
I'm glad to see such a powerful video doing the rounds - hopefully it will help people who have an eating disorder to get help. It is possible to recover...I have just finished treatment at a wonderful centre in Sydney called EatFed.
All credit to the girls who made this, and if it can raise awareness of Eating Disorders and body image then that's great.. BUT. It feels like a film made by 13 year old girls who have never experienced an ED and are using rhetoric and imagery taught to them in their 1hour grade 7 class on body image. "People feel alone", "girls feel fat" etc. As someone who had anorexia from age 11 to 14, this completely fails to engage or resonate with me now, and would have failed similarly back then.
One key feature of anorexia and bulimia is the obsessive hiding of the disorder. The pizza parlour scene is really unrealistic.
And the message at the end about being beautiful? In the majority of cases, beauty is not the reason for an ED developing. However the concept that we need to be beautiful (either by meeting impossible standards, or by this hollow "achieve self acceptance by telling yourself you are beautiful"- see also Dove campaigns) is one of the things that compounds the ED behaviour and makes it harder to break from. Sorry, but this video felt shallow, disengaged and misguided.
The feature of obsessively hiding the disorder has changed over time. This isn't necessarily the case any more with young people. I work as a counsellor with young people - and many do not hide their desire to not eat. Many are posting about it obsessively on social media blog sites. The culture has changed over the years I've been working in this area - and what we knew before about the behaviour of young people with eating disorders is not what we are seeing in the behaviour of young people now - particularly those young people in the earlier stages of the development of the disorder.
I think the sense of isolation and the sadness felt by people with eating disorders - even when surrounded by friends - is captured simply yet I a very touching way in this film. Congrats to you two young girls who made this.
*captured simply yet IN a very touching way
And
*Congrats to THE two young girls who make this
Obviously my typing skills need some work!