Review: Embrace Kids is a moving documentary from Taryn Brumfitt

My high school bestie had a mum who loved her very much but sometimes that love expressed itself in ways that probably wouldn't stand up today.

When my friend was discovered to be a secret smoker, her mother bought her a pack of Alpine Lights and forced her to sit in front of her and smoke the entire packet until she was sick to her stomach (which just gave her a life-long aversion to menthol cigarettes, not the non-mentholated version).

Frequently her mother made helpful suggestions about how her daughter might lose weight, and seeing her sitting with her head in her hands one day, her mother asked, "Are you sad because you're fat, matey?"

While we still laugh about that misplaced motherly concern today, I have been pondering challenging parental conversations as I watched the new Australian documentary Embrace: Kids.

This is a continuation of the 2016 film Embrace in which Australian writer and filmmaker Taryn Brumfitt tackled the subject of body image as she dealt with her own issues and acceptance of her body and herself.

She made herself an internationally known figure in this space and saw the doco played in dozens of countries and to decent critical and financial success.

Brumfitt turned her focus on children and their body issues in her book Embrace: Kids, published a few weeks ago and this film sits alongside that publication.

Both book and film have a noble intention, to arm parents to have conversations with their children so that we might collectively build a generation who accept their skin and the bodies they live in and aren't conditioned by pretty social media influencers and the constructed lies of the images they create.

Another intention is to ensure we parents don't hand down the social programming our own parents or childhood experiences or media saturation did to our own self-images.

Brumfitt places herself in the narrative, though not as much as with the first film, and constructs the documentary initially with herself as the to-camera narrator.

Her subjects present her arguments better than her narrative pieces, because they are more directly relatable to her intended junior audience.

These include a young AFL player paralysed after an in-game accident who has grown to accept his new body and to rise to the opportunities and profile it has presented him with; an astute non-binary bow-tie-wearing Tedx-presenting young South Australian who deconstructs the concept of gender; and the dad who became an internet sensation for dressing up like Elsa with his son who wanted to go to Halloween in a Disney Princess dress.

There's the brilliant British actress Jameela Jamil, whom kids will most currently know from the Disney+ show She Hulk: Attorney At Law. Jamil has been a long-time fighter on social media against false statements made by commercial operators trying to sell diet and beauty products to children.

For the parents, there's Aussie comedian Celeste Barber, whose local fame grew to the international level when she started piss-taking social media influencers.

Twice in this film I found myself really going through something, tears pouring down my face, and I'm sure plenty of viewers will find they connect to its messaging.

For that, kudos to Brumfitt.

For parents, a family visit to a screening of this film is a terrific conversation starter, if there are conversations to be had within your family about acceptance - reinforcing a healthy self-image for our kids or coming to our own acceptance of however our kids see and know themselves.

What might be confronting for some parents will be owning up to their own conditioning and behaviours first.

I suppose those parents who have not progressed along that journey won't be bringing their kids to a film like this.

Perhaps in time.