Eating disorders means a spectrum of mainly psychological disorders that concern the relationship between individuals and food: anorexia and bulimia are sensitive issues with which cinema has dealt with the right prudence, almost always to talk about teenage problems linked to self-perception.

The first American films, among adolescence, bulimia and self-harm

Despite problems linked to the relationship with food are transversal and can involve various categories of people, the cinematographic representation of anorexia is linked to protagonists with precise characteristics, almost always at the center of the story there is an adolescent girl, who deals with a difficult relationship with her body and with self-acceptance. Sometimes it has to do with a stable but careless family, like in The Best Little Girl in the World, 1981, probably the first film in the world about this issue. The cast includes a very young Jennifer Jason Leigh. The Karen Carpenter Story is the true story of a singer, who in her prime starts a fight against anorexia and bulimia. The production on the theme goes on along these lines and even though it is mainly conducted on television networks, the average quality remains decent thanks to titles such as For the Love of Nancy and When Friendship Kills. Of course in many of these films the emphasis is on the context, the scholastic one, and that of social relationships: very often eating disorders are a result of bullying or because of situations of marginalization that increase feelings of inadequacy. In this respect we can consider many stories that stress the difficulty in adhering to grooming standards and particularly challenging figures, such as in the field of gymnastics (Perfect Body) and of dance (Dying to Dance, Center Stage).

Recent anorexia movies: in 2017 “To the Bone” on Netflix

Since the year 2000 the list of films on the issue has gotten longer, also thanks to a couple of Italian films (Maledimiele and First Love). However the majority of the titles remain made in the USA. Among these it is worth mentioning Hunger Point, with a good cast and the semidocumentary To Be Fat Like Me: in this film a young Kaley Cuoco, not yet famous for the TV series “The Big Bang Theory”, stars as an athletic teenager, who wears a sort of foam rubber coveralls to appear obese: in this way she will experience how mortifying it is to be severely overweight in an American high school. In 2014 Starving in Suburbia was released and most recently this issue is back in the news thanks to the beautiful film (produced by Netflix) To the Bone, with Lily Collins as protagonist and the great Keanu Reeves in the part of a doctor who uses unconventional methods. This is surely one of the best films on anorexia.