Carne

Five women in different phases of life talk about their sometimes ambiguous relationship with their own body, and how they experience the gaze of others. Their stories, covering subjects such as being overweight, menstruation, menopause and aging, are both familiar and surprising. An overweight girl describes how she took courage from the fact that although she wasn’t one of the fastest at a school sports event, she kept going for longer than the thin girls. A trans woman discusses her constant confrontations with the preconceptions of men who see a voluptuous black woman’s body as the ultimate object of lust, and who frequently react aggressively to her appearance.

The stories are presented in five chapters whose titles are taken from the five stages of meat roasting, from rare to well done. But the women themselves aren’t subjected to our gaze, because they never appear in the film. Their words, which we hear exclusively in voice-over, are illustrated in a variety of remarkable ways and with help from various animation techniques: clay animation, stop motion and reedited old black-and-white film footage.