Educational Media Reviews Online

This DVD is an edited compilation of short documentaries made by high school girls over the course of a school year in Montreal, Canada. The girls, who were taking a course on video production and media literacy when these films were made, were given an assignment to “investigate one’s own life,” cover a range of pertinent topics, including self-injury, media, fashion, and body image fashion, school popularity and hazing, bulimia and anorexia, parents, and boyfriends and sexuality. As a result, the overall work is collage of voices, subjects, and documentary strategies, something that is both the film’s strength and its weakness.

Among the weaknesses is some unevenness in the audio and video quality, especially in the segments filmed outside, but these challenges do not detract much from the overall impact of the film’s message. The film’s dominant style is that of the interview—girls interviewing each other singly or in groups—which make the animated segments that come near the end of the film a surprise. At the same time, the variety of styles and perspectives, and the fact that these segments were filmed by the girls themselves, are its strength. Clearly these young women have creative forces to be reckoned with.

In its combination of grass-roots feminism with media literacy and activism, this film overlaps in message and outlook with Picture Perfect, a recent DVD from Fanlight Productions. This Is My Body focuses less on women in the media in favor of a wider set of cultural and psychological pressures, on the one hand, and focuses more on adolescent experience than does Picture Perfect. Its collaged nature—and some of the content on self-injury—give This Is My Body a grittier feel but its message of girl power through video production perfectly complements the “take action” message of Picture Perfect. This film would work well in high school or college class or program focused on media literacy, gender studies, and the pressures of growing up.