Your Fat Friend

In the 21^st century, our obsession with our health has become more prevalent than ever. Social media allows our spare time to be filled with fitness instructors, healthy food and lifestyle gurus telling us how we should be living, but the platforms also act as a breeding ground for internet trolls. Popular anonymous blogger Aubrey Gordon seeks to change that through her activism every day, spending five years writing about the realities of living as a self-described “very fat person”. Now, under the direction of Jeanie Finlay, she is facing the public for the first time.

Gordon is probably the best advocate for the cause you could find. She has a wonderfully infectious personality matched by her no-frills directness when addressing the topic of being fat. She brings life, happiness and energy to a topic that is so often discussed with negative connotations without fully assessing the knock-on effects of the language surrounding it.

As a child, her parents send her to “fat camp”, but the long-lasting psychological implications of doing so lie more than skin deep. Through very honest discussions with her family, she proves that conversing aids understanding.

The filmmaking in Your Fat Friend is insightful and uplifting, a common theme in Finlay’s more recent work, which includes Seahorse, a piece about a pregnant transgender man’s experience of parenthood. Interchanging between self-footage, home video from when she was a child and more professional filming with Finlay, Gordon gets her book deal and wades through a sea of hostility and bullying online, but her message remains unwavering. Fat people are not evil, nor are they grotesque. No matter how a person looks, we are all the same human race and, in Gordon’s words, here on earth to look after each other.

The argument that facts and figures come second to a person’s mental well-being certainly has its validation in this topic, and it is a very common argument in the present day, but the documentary does leave a few questions unanswered. It does a brilliant job at presenting the case of eliminating prejudices against those who are overweight, but it could go one step further and discuss how the obesity crisis enveloping the United States and Europe could be tackled. It is of course not created with the primary intention of presenting a solution to the crisis, but a little more exploration into the science behind general health would add another dimension to the feature.

This all said, thanks to the hard work and commitment from both Finlay and Gordon, You Fat Friend is a documentary that addresses an issue so often considered taboo and brings the debate around body positivity to the big screen in a way not done before, providing a strong foundation and springboard for further investigation and societal change.

Guy Lambert

Your Fat Friend is released in select cinemas on 9^th February 2024.

Watch the trailer for Your Fat Friend here: