She eats

For more than thirty years, the director has been waging a fierce, silent war against her own hunger. Few people know that her body is a battlefield and her relationship with food a permanent conflict. Yet there is nothing exceptional about it: it is the story of thousands of little girls who grew into women, each in her own corner, paralyzed by the fear of being judged, of being seen as a clinical case, or of receiving a deluge of unsolicited advice.

On the eve of her 40th birthday, she decides to give herself an unprecedented gift: making peace with her appetite. Alone at first, she goes knocking on doors. She wants to hunt down the culprits, silence the intrusive thoughts and, above all, to be told why. Why is it so hard? Why can’t she lay down her arms? And above all, she needs to know whether she is alone in this fight.

She sets out to meet the women who eat, past and present: those who struggle, devour, transgress, those who are dishonored or erased. Those who observe, too, those who investigate the present and those who dig through the past. She is looking for answers, role models, beacons of resistance. Women who freely enjoy an act as ordinary as eating.

At the crossroads of documentary, essay and personal narrative, SHE EATS follows this countdown to the threshold of forty. With no moralizing and no indictment, with tenderness and mischief, the film turns a solitary struggle into a collective, immersive and joyful experience. A lucid and sensitive journey through a world where eating is never a neutral act, even less so when you are a woman.