Partway through the documentary, Your Fat Friend , we catch its subject, Aubrey Gordon, in an emotional moment. She’s recounting the newscasts she grew up watching, where fearmongering headlines about rising obesity rates were accompanied by footage of fat people shot from the neck down. “I spent a good 10 to 15 years watching that B-roll and would often tear up watching it .
.. because I was looking for myself,” she says, getting emotional again.
There’s a cruel, dehumanising legacy of fat people on screen. It’s in the disembodied news footage that Gordon recalls and in characters like “fat Monica” from Friends and Gwyneth Paltrow’s Rosemary in Shallow Hal , both of whom are played for laughs. In Your Fat Friend , Gordon, now 40, finally finds herself on screen, but not in the way her younger self might have feared.
In its opening scenes, we see Gordon swimming – something she loves but avoids doing because of the staring – shot from below and glowing blue in the pool’s water (by chance, the pool happens to be the same one Gordon swam in as a child). We see her relaxing in a hot spring as close-up shots of her body – frank and unflinching – are interspersed with shots of nature. “I wanted to make her body look magnificent,” says documentarian Jeanie Finlay of her depiction of Aubrey Gordon.
Credit: Jeanie Finlay Created by British documentarian Jeanie Finlay, Your Fat Friend follows Gordon and her life in Portland, Oregon, over the course of six .