Beauty mark Body image & the race for perfection

Streaming video - 2014

How do our families influence our relationship with our own bodies? How do American pop culture's standards of beauty get inside our hearts and heads? In what ways can sport and the drive for fitness actually make us sick rather than healthy? In this courageous, deeply personal new film, Diane Israel examines American culture's toxic emphasis on thinness, beauty, and physical perfection. Israel, a Boulder-based psychotherapist and former champion triathlete, talks candidly about her own struggle with eating disorders and obsessive exercising, fearlessly confronting her own painful past as she tries to come to terms with American culture's unhealthy fixation on self-destructive ideals of beauty and competitiveness. The film le...nds context to Israel's personal odyssey with fascinating insights from athletes, body builders, fashion models, and inner-city teens, as well as prominent cultural critics and authors such as Eve Ensler, Paul Campos, and Naomi Wolf. In a special bonus feature, Israel talks in detail about where she is in her recovery 2 years after the filming of Beauty Mark. Beauty Mark is a classroom edition (produced by Carla Precht in association with MEF) of Diane Israel, Carla Precht, and Kathleen Man's 75-minute documentary film by the same title. more