COCOON is a brief, heady short that uncovers the visceral experiences of anorexia, born from a frustration with conventional depictions of eating disorders in film; with the overt focus on physical symptoms, and the lack of interest in how it feels, what it offers, why people get stuck in the sickness.  

Treading the line between experimental and narrative filmmaking, the film follows closely as a girl’s obsession with her body starts to seep into the natural world around her. Her thighs are mirrored by conjoined tree trunks, her reflection warps from puddle to puddle, and the high of starvation is made euphoric by the beautiful, vivid canopy she spins beneath. Like the illness itself, the landscape fast becomes an addictive mirage.  

Although the film was inspired by the filmmaker’s own eating disorder, it aims to speak beyond anorexia, utilising the form itself to explore compulsion, mania, and the universally disturbing experience of having a body. As time passes, anorexia is also understood by the filmmaker as partly driven by their own gender dysphoria, and COCOON, therefore, as an expression of how it feels when you cannot make a home in your own body. The film was commissioned through the Roundhouse’s Film Fund, for emerging experimental filmmakers under 25.