Your Fat Friend + Virtual Director Q&A

Award Winning films from Cornwall Film Festival - Opening Film 

Your Fat Friend | Dir Jeanie Finlay | 2023 | 1hr 36 mins | UK | Documentary | CFF12A

Your Fat Friend is a film about an incisive, funny, and frank portrait of bestselling author Aubrey Gordon, whose advocacy work has made an immense impact on how people view and treat fat people. In February 2016, an anonymous blogger known as @yrfatfriend penned a post entitled “A Request From Your Fat Friend: What I Need When We Talk About Bodies” that discussed the realities of what it’s like to go through life as a self-described “very fat person” with candour and vulnerability. The piece struck a chord and quickly went viral. For the next five years, “Your Fat Friend” published numerous popular essays addressing society’s obsession with fatphobia and aggressive anti-fatness. When the writer, Aubrey Gordon, published her first book, she boldly decided to shed her anonymity and enter the public spotlight to face her supporters, trolls, and critics for the first time.  

Jeanie Finlay's Your Fat Friend was announced as the winner of our 2023 Audience Award at Sheffield Doc Fest   

Filmmaker Jeanie Finlay is one of Britain’s most distinctive documentary makers  will be joining us after the screening for a virtual Q&A   

Finlay creates award-winning work for cinema and television, telling intimate stories to international audiences. She has made films for HBO, IFC, BBC as well as four commissions for the acclaimed BBC Storyville strand, including BIFA nominated The Great Hip Hop Hoax and BIFA winning Orion:The Man Who Would Be King. In 2008 she founded Glimmer Films to develop and deliver ambitious, engaging and intimate documentary works, made in the region for international audiences. Glimmer strive for gender equity in front of and behind the camera, with all recent films made by a predominantly (over 70%) female and NB identifying team. Glimmer Films aim to: Creatively challenge the form of documentary. Celebrate the untold stories of people far from the spotlight. Further explore “wraparound filmmaking”; continuing a groundbreaking practice of engaging with audiences in innovative and meaningful ways throughout production and distribution.