The Skinny On This Is My Body: Filmmmaking As Empowerment Intervention and Activism

Abstract

Over the course of one academic year (2005/2006), I worked in a Montreal, Canadian all-girls’ high school as a critical media literacy and video production teacher wearing a researcher’s hat and invited my 16-year old students to explore personal experiences as starting points for making meaningful, critical, and trans-formative media. The film called This Is My Body—distributed by the National Film Board of Canada and accompanied by a Teacher’s Guide—is a video collage of my students’ film work who through research and documentary video production explore issues related to media influence, peer pressure, body image, eating disorders, self-injury, boyfriends, sexuality, and parenting. In this paper, I introduce the arts-based empowerment intervention methodology that facilitated the girls to become researchers and filmmakers of their lives, and I share one student’s pedagogical journey to shed light on how the girls used filmmaking to actualize inner wellbeing and inspire social action.