Film Screenings by Plaza Media Arts Center

Please join us for a special screening of two Award Winning films:  

• Tapeworm, a short film written and directed by Margaret Laney, and the educational film  
• Killing Us Softly: Advertising's Image of Women, featuring Jean Kilbourne.   

Enjoy a Q&A with the Tapeworm producers and our special guest Dr. Mary Schultz, a clinical psychologist who specializes in eating disorders.

TAPEWORM - SYNOPSIS:

Ever considered eating a tapeworm to lose weight?

Teresa is struggling with her body image in the environment of an all-girls preparatory high school. A science class project provides an innovative yet dangerous solution/opportunity: her Internet research of tapeworms leads her to a website called "the tapeworm diet". The next day, she enlists her best friend/partner in crime, Janie, to help her steal the tapeworm from their dissection laboratory. The girls struggle over who "gets" to eat the tapeworm as they both feel like they need to lose weight. In the end Theresa learns a valuable lesson about friendship and the dangers of weight-loss.

KILLING US SOFTLY - SYNOPSIS:  

In this new, highly anticipated update of her pioneering Killing Us Softly series, the first in more than a decade, Jean Kilbourne takes a fresh look at how advertising traffics distorted and destructive ideals of femininity. The film marshals a range of new print and television advertisements to lay bare a stunning pattern of damaging gender stereotypes -- images and messages that too often reinforce unrealistic, and unhealthy, perceptions of beauty, perfection, and sexuality. By bringing Kilbourne's groundbreaking analysis up to date, Killing Us Softly 4 stands to challenge a new generation of students to take advertising seriously, and to think critically about popular culture and its relationship to sexism, eating disorders, and gender violence.