“America the Beautiful,” a documentary that explores America’s unhealthy obsession with beauty, will premiere in the Twin Cities Thursday, June 19, at the Lagoon Cinema in Uptown. (Tickets are $15 - Showings at 7 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. )

The screening is sponsored by the recently-established Emily Program Foundation (which operates the Anna Westin House in Chaska). It will be followed by a community forum featuring writer, producer, director Darryl Roberts and Dr. Jillian Croll, president of the Emily Foundation, as well as other foundation board members including Anna Westin House founder and Chaska resident Kitty Westin.

The Emily Foundation was established to lead community conversation on the issues of body image, weight and eating disorders. Roberts’ groundbreaking movie is a perfect fit for that mission, said Croll. “I love this movie. It’s a captivating mouthpiece for the message that those of us who treat eating disorders have been trying to get out for years,” she said.

Croll first saw the film, and met its director, at the International Association of Eating Disorders Symposium in Florida earlier this year.

“There was a standing ovation, and there’s been a standing ovation everywhere he has shown it,” she said.

Audience responses have led some to describe the work as “more than a movie – it’s a movement.”

At the gala premiere for “America the Beautiful” in Chicago earlier this month, 300 people were turned away at the door.

Croll describes the film as the “Super Size Me” of the beauty industry, a reference to the 2004 Academy Award-nominated documentary which took an irreverent look at the fast food industry and its role in obesity in America.

Now it’s the beauty industry’s turn.

The ubiquitous deceptions, by advertisers and the media, that thin, beautiful models set the standard to which all women must aspire, has been identified by some as a primary cause of low self-esteem and the meteoric rise in clinical depression in woman.

Low self-esteem and over-valuing appearance also are core features of eating disorders and drive the relentless pursuit of an impossible standard of weight and beauty that so many in our culture struggle with, said Croll.

To demonstrate this deception, Roberts chronicles 12-year-old Gerren Taylor’s journey from an unknown, innocent adolescent to supermodel.

Croll said the film stands up against the beauty industry’s unending assault on the female psyche. “It embraces the idea that body image can be positive and that beauty doesn’t have to adhere to only one standard.”

In an interview following the film’s screening at the AFI Dallas International Film Festival last year, Roberts said “America is on a quest for physical perfection, fueled by the greed of a few companies that get proportionally richer as our self esteem tanks. This film shows where this stems from and how it is probably not in our best interest to buy into it.”

When: 7 and 9:30 p.m. Thursday, June 19 

Where: The Lagoon Cinema, 1320 Lagoon Avenue, Minneapolis, 55408 

Sponsored by: The Emily Program Foundation 

Tickets: $15.  Available at the box office or in advance by calling Lindsay Brown at The Emily Program, 651.379.6130 or lindsay@emilyprogram.com Seating is limited. 

Community Forum Participants: Writer, producer, director Darryl Roberts; Dr. Jillian Croll, president of The Emily Program Foundation, as well as other members of the foundation board. The board includes Kitty Westin, president of the national Eating Disorders Coalition, headquartered in Washington, D.C.; Joe Kelly, co-founder and director of Dads and Daughters; and Dianne Neumark-Sztainer, PhD, of the University of Minnesota, researcher and author of “I'm, Like, SO Fat!"