Production Process

The concept of From the Body Cage was born when I was in Africa in 2002 with Dartmouth College's Environmental program. On day-long drives through beautiful but often empty landscape I had the calm to listen to the issues closest to my heart, and I realized that the foremost issue was my utter inability to convey to my loving and understanding parents what I had to cope with in the world of my eating disorder. Since I had freshly sold my previous documentary to a distribution company, I was ready for another project and started immediately thinking how to make a film that would portray the internal world of eating disorders.

While my own experiencs were the genesis of the film, From the Body Cage is based on a richness of research which ranged from reading tons of academic papers to conducting numerous interviews and collecting diary entries. It included also professional psychological and anthropological consultation with Prof. Robert Welsch, Prof. Dr. Da Shih Hu and Dr. Mira M. Czarnawska, as well with Michael Sacca and James Brown.

In the process of my research for the film, I had the privilege of interviewing 16 current and former eating disorder sufferers on camera, and engaged in unrecorded conversations with 12 more. While this is a small and statistically insignificant research sample, it allowed me to develop an intimate personal relation with all the participants. This gave my inquiry a rare level of depth, very precious in dealing with such complex phenomena as eating disorders. It has been an amazing experience, mainly because all my interviewees were truly wonderful people. The whole process has confirmed for me just how wrong is the stereotype that an eating disorder affects someone with little substance, a "blond spoilt girl looking at Cosmo ads all day long". I have had men contact me. I have had people of ethnic backgrounds contact me.

I owe big thanks to all those who let me glipmse their stories and their thoughts. The success of the film is largely due to your trust in me.

The research served as a basis for a collage-like scritp the aim of which was to syntesize the emotional process of the ating disorder spiral. In order to convey as accurate and in-depth a picture as possible we concentrated on one demographic group, choosing the environment where eating disorders are most prominent, namely college-age women.

Most of the scenes are shot in a studio with three wonderful actresses, Marina McClure, Diahna Kirschner and Erica Lin. While they were chosen purely for their talent and had a varying exposure to eating disorders before, there is hardly anyone these days who does not know the issues at least through the friend of a friend, or a second cousin. Our work together was deeply satisfying.

The film is crowned with evocative original music by John Marchesini. Before composing, John did his own research, consulting a good friend who suffered from bulimia. The result is the music's perfect synchronization with the subject matter and touching beauty.