Eat Your Catfish

An intimate documentary portrait of a woman with motor neurone disease, as she navigates the ups and downs of family life. Made in close collaboration with the subject, Kathryn Arjomand, the film draws on 930 hours of footage shot from a camera fixed to her wheelchair, capturing her point of view with a fisheye lens that emphasises Kathryn’s limited field of vision as well as the cramped New York apartment in which she lives. Co-directed by Kathryn’s son Noah, Eat Your Catfish is a deeply moving film imbued with moments of humour, capturing life in all of its messy detail.

This film is structured as a first-person account of Kathryn’s final stage before death. It is, in its totality, her plea for the wider world to understand what she went through, why she persisted, and finally why she gave up. So, rather than turning and looking at Kathryn, or asking others to sit down and tell us about her, we aim to bring the viewer as close as possible to actually being Kathryn and experiencing what she experienced. Through Kathryn’s own narration, we enter the inner world of a severely disabled woman and mother facing her own mortality.

Directors Adam Isenberg, Noah Amir Arjomand & Senem Tüzen