The project began in 2013 when Brumfitt, an Adelaide photographer and mother of three, posted a before and after photos of herself on Facebook. It’s the kind of inspiring, accessible documentary that could actually change the way people think – though it’s up against the Goliath of global fashion and diet industries. Embrace is Brumfitt’s fight-back manifesto, a stirring and highly entertaining film that celebrates diversity and preaches self-acceptance. The statistics she quotes suggest we’re in the midst of an epidemic of self-loathing: 91 per cent of women hate their bodies, 70 per cent of girls are dissatisfied, and 50 per cent of 5-to-12 year-olds want to lose weight.
The school espouses a “whole child” philosophy, and its mission statement, inscribed on the cafeteria walls, includes the sentence: “We value the imagination and curiosity of children and respect childhood as an integral part of life.‘Disgusting’ is the word most frequently used when documentary filmmaker and body image activist Taryn Brumfitt asks 100 women to describe their bodies.
Embrace documentary movie#
“You would not believe what reactions you get from other parents when you mention what colleges your children are looking at you’re so judged,” Tara Vessels, a mother at New Canaan Country School, told about 40 other parents and staff members who discussed the movie last Friday in the school cafeteria. towns where an Ivy League sticker on the back of a Range Rover is a given. In addition to New Canaan and Winnetka, there were screenings last week in Los Altos, Calif., Bethesda, Md., and Chappaqua, N.Y. Most of the families in “Race to Nowhere” are suburban and privileged, and the film has found its audience in those communities where parents often move for excellent schools. “They’re spitting back but not retaining the information,” Dr. An educator, Denise Pope, a lecturer at Stanford, says that the University of California requires remedial courses of half its students, even though their high school grades were stellar. Employers complain that college graduates these days lack initiative. She talks to students, teachers and experts who say that teaching to tests, including the Advanced Placement tests, narrows education and diminishes creativity and independent thinking. Abeles believes that the testing movement is what has caused education to go off the tracks. While “Waiting for Superman” lionizes urban reformers who embrace standardized testing as a necessary yardstick to hold schools and teachers accountable, Ms. “My passion is around the change this film has the potential to create,” Ms. The film’s Web site encourages viewers to follow up with local activism (and also links to research and studies supporting the film, which pretty much avoids citing any data). But she is not convinced that the movie would reach as wide an audience or inspire viewers to stay for the discussions, which are moderated by principals, child psychologists and sometimes Ms.
Abeles has been approached by major distributors offering to place it in commercial theaters. With her movie’s grass-roots success, Ms. The movie introduces boys who drop out of high school from the pressure, girls who suffer stress-induced insomnia and worse, and students for whom “cheating has become another course,” as one puts it. “It’s hard to be the vice president of your class, play on the soccer team and do homework,” she says. “Everyone expects us to be superheroes,” one high school senior in the film says.Īnother tells of borrowing her friends’ prescription for Adderall to juggle her many commitments. Left somewhat unexamined is the role of parents whose high expectations contribute the most pressure of all. The film portrays the pressures when schools pile on hours of homework and coaches turn sports into year-round obligations. Francie Irvine, the assistant head of school, said, “Our parents’ association president called me and said, ‘My sister just saw this in California and we have to, have to, have to have it here.’ ” All 325 seats in the auditorium of New Canaan Country School in Connecticut were filled during a screening for parents last Thursday night.
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