“I took pride in being skinny, shockingly skinny” says Eisha Marjara in her director’s statement for Am I the skinniest person you’ve ever seen.
The images of the director’s younger self indeed provide a shock in this acclaimed documentary that chronicles her experience with anorexia. Now streaming for free from the National Film Board of Canada, Am I the skinniest person you’ve ever seen offers a personal reflection of Marjara’s childhood pact with her sister. The film premiered at Hot Docs last year where it won the Betty Youson Award for Best Canadian Short Documentary.
Marjara tells how her sister Seema went on a diet one summer during her teens. Marjara was 11 and decided to go alone for the ride. Seema stopped the diet, but Eisha did not. The director flips through old photographs revealing how the diet morphed into an eating disorder as her ideal weight proved elusive. Growing skinnier and skinnier, the obsession with being thin took a toll on Eisha’s body and pushed her to the brink of death. The film offers a love letter to that young woman and others like her who struggle with body image and ideas of self-worth.
“Girls turn their bodies into projects all the time,” says Marjara. “Be it changing their hair, their makeup, their clothes, their weight—shaping their identities endlessly, religiously. Erasing parts of themselves and inventing something better, happier, prettier, skinnier, fairer. Creating something perfect. Because girls are constantly told that they are not good enough, that they are simply not enough. Some girls like me were under the influence of such messages more than others. For me the circumstances were ripe. I was the ideal candidate for anorexia.”
Watch Sm I the skinniest person you’ve ever seen below from the NFB.
Am I the skinniest person you’ve ever seen?, Eisha Marjara, provided by the National Film Board of Canada
