The Body Beautiful

The extraordinary biographical details (aged and ill white mother/ young black daughter retired from a modelling career) seem the stuff that only fiction could contrive; instead they build a revealing and painfully ironic truth as the filmmaker traces the parallel life stories of herself and her mother, contrasting the mother's scarred and aged beauty with the daughter's statuesque, "perfect" figure.

A daring, highly stylised doco from the director of Coffee Coloured Children (MFF '89). (T.B)