THIN, 2005, United States, 105 min.
Language(s): English Genre: Documentary
Release Data: November 2006
Selected Recognitions: Cowboy Award, Jackson Hole, 2006; Grierson Award, London, UK, 2006; Nominated for Grand Jury Prize in Documentary, Sundance, 2006
Based on the book of the same name by director Lauren Greenfield
Buy Now
Director(s): Lauren Greenfield
What It's About: The director follows four young women (ages 15 - 30) who have spent their lives starving themselves – often to the verge of death – in their quest to be “thin.” There is brassy Polly who slashed her wrists over two slices of pizza; 15-year-old Brittany whose mother also struggles with an eating disorder; Shelly, a nurse with a feeding tube in her stomach; and Alisa who joined the army so that she could lose weight. These women have tiny shrunken bodies and, it turns out, tiny shrunken minds. They are infants in terms of their ability to cope with the pressures of life, but they are willing to sacrifice jobs, relationships, even their children, in their all-consuming desire to be thin. In the pale light of dawn, they line up, numbed skeletons, wrapped in blankets, for their first weigh-in of the day. Welcome to The Renfrew Center, a South Florida treatment facility for eating disorders.
What to Look For: Director Lauren Greenfield’s background is as a photographer and her photographic eye is front and centre as it looks at the terrible costs of self-imposed starvation. The filmmaker documents the daily rituals, spontaneous friendships and startling swings between recovery and relapse that make up life at the Center.
We accompany the women on daily weigh-ins even as the staff counters the tricks anorexics commonly use to hide the fact that they’re not eating, or that they’re purging after meals. The focus here is up-close and intimate with the subjects rather than an exploration of the social and medical questions of why as many as five million people in the United States – most of them women – are suffering from anorexia and bulimia. It’s said that the camera adds pounds, but these women don’t look fashionably slender, the look as though a breeze might blow them away. Note how, like many drug addicts, these women return to their old ways – and their “thin” lives after leaving the safety of the clinic.
Why It Matters: To see this film is to see people at war not only with food but with their own minds and bodies. These women are starving themselves to death with a discipline and a dedication that is at once mind-boggling and horrifying – and will put the average person’s desire to “loose a few pounds” into an entirely new perspective. What is going on in these women’s minds manifests as extraordinary pain and suffering that goes way beyond any vanity or desire for health. You may be shocked at the emotional, physical, and psychological ravages that anorexia produces. Altogether, the film leaves you feeling emotionally thin – which is perhaps an approximation of how anorexics feel.
Available on DVD through our listed on-line sources