INSTINCT

Film making has always been about my desire to connect with people and not only feel seen and heard in my experiences, but make others feel the same has pushed me to tell personal stories. I feel that the more vulnerable and honest you are, the more you can help others. 

Having an eating disorder during the most formative times of your life when you’re barely even a teenager can impact you in many ways. One of the major ways being the search for validation. It is something I didn’t quite realize had been so deeply engrained into me. 

I’ve never felt like I’ve seen eating disorders represented in any real way. The true brutality of what it’s like and how badly you wish you could do things you’d only dare think of your in head. So, I decided I’d show it in a way that doesn’t hold back from what I felt during this time in my life.

I felt that telling a story about body image, body dysmorphia, and eating disorders through body horror was the best way to encapsulate my experience. So often I wished I could simply pull “fat” from my body, and in my head, that’s what I saw. Using the psychological of Black Swan, the clinical of Never Rarely Sometimes Always, and the body horror of Cronenberg or Ducorneau, this film is about a young man in treatment for anorexia who goes to extreme lengths to cope with his eating disorder and attempt to find validation through his body and how others see him. 

This is something I’ve needed to say since I was twelve years old, and I’ve figured out how to say it. This film will be graphic. It will be honest. And it will be hard to watch, sometimes. But that’s how it should be when dealing with topics that are this hard to experience.