Next stop Calgary, Canada! I’m onored to be headed up to Alberta as a guest filmmaker for the opening weekend of Fairytales 2013, Calgary’s 15th annual queer film fest. THE SKIN I’M IN will screen 7PM Sunday, May 26th at the old Plaza Theatre, followed by a Q&A with myself and executive producer Lee Biolos. Spread the word, and come join us! Click here for full festival details
I’m humbled by this review of the film which appeared today in EDGE MIAMI, in advance of Saturday’s Miami Gay and Lesbian Film Festival Screening.
“Fox allows the documentary to open up and breathe, and in doing so, composes a lyrical film built out of layers, with the tattoo occupying only the most superficial of those layers — that is, the tattoo lives on the “skin” of the film, just as it lives on Fox’s skin, but it emerges from depths that are dark and perilous. The light to which the filmmaker, and his film, ascends is warm and enveloping…This documentary may take the camera-as-confessor approach that our online culture seems to foster, but Fox the filmmaker knows how to take the stuff of memoir and fashion art. His transformative journey is remarkable, and perhaps unique, but parts of it will be recognizable to many viewers; moreover, this film may well become part of the healing paths of those who sit with Fox, in a darkened theatre, to share in his journey.” Read full review here.
The Skin I’m In has been selected to screen as part of the official competition at the 2013 15th Annual Miami Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, which runs April 26-May 5, 2013. The film will screen at the historic Coral Gables Art Cinema Saturday, May 4th at 3 PM. Tickets and full festival information available here.
The historic Coral Gables Art Cinema
THE SKIN I’M IN producer Lee Biolos, MATERIAL SUCCESS director Jesse Mann, and THE SKIN I’M IN director Broderick Fox at the 2013 Victoria Film Festival Opening Gala. Photo by Jason Whyte
I shot much of the project myself. It also pulls from a lifelong archive of video, film, and photographic imagery I shot growing up. As such it contains a dizzying array of formats including Super 8 film, VHS, Hi-8, Mini DV, SD Video, and HDV. Two wonderful friends from film school shot key materials; Sarah Levy, shot my first trip up to Victoria to meet Rande and also filmed the sit-down interviews with my multiple “selves.” Andrew Groves shot nearly all the tattoo sessions for me, 29 hours of tattooing all told. It was a real gift to have the camera operators in these intimate situations be close friends whom I trust implicitly. In a few additional instances other friends, a former student, and my partner picked up the camera when needed. People have called the project a very big “little film,” and I hope it inspires others to pick up the tools and technologies at their disposal to tell great stories.
“PART OF THIS FILM IS ME TRYING TO LINK MY HEAD BACK UP TO MY BODY,” SAYS FOX.
TIMES COLONIST
JANUARY 30, 2013
BOX OFFICE
What: The Skin I’m In
Where: Vic Theatre
When: Saturday, 9:30 p.m.
Rating: Four stars (out of five)
Broderick Fox never imagined he might someday be mistaken for Antonio Banderas.
Online searches for his documentary The Skin I’m In, which makes its Canadian première at the Victoria Film Festival, often yield references to The Skin I Live In. In that twisted thriller directed by Pedro Almodovar, Banderas plays a sinister plastic surgeon who holds a beautiful woman captive to test a synthetic alternative to human skin he’s perfecting.
Fox’s unflinching low-tech reflection on years of bodily shame, addiction and other issues that inspired him to transform his body into a living canvas seems worlds apart from Almodovar’s sleek, creepy meditation on beauty. But a Spanish film scholar who once mentored Fox noted the films resonate in similar ways, he said.
Both, for instance, explore the nature of identity. In Fox’s case, it was the spiritual and sexual ramifications of identity that would unite him with Rande Cook, the Victoria-based First Nations artist who created the full-back tattoo that memorializes Fox’s experiences.
“There are a lot of people who might write the film off as narcissistic,” admits Fox, 38, who worked on his project for six years and titled it early on. Read full article here.
By Colin Cayer – Monday Magazine
Published: January 30, 2013 4:00 PM
“There’s this fine line. There are native artists that consider everything to be sacred, yet they’ll sell it for a buck,” says Cook who needed to find a way that still felt right to support himself through his art and culture. He was left with one choice. “I had to create a new art form,” Cook says.
Instead of using sacred items representing the spirits of land, sky and ocean, Cook turned to the ancestral stories learned from his grandparents and interpreted their imagery — no desecration required.
This art form is what attracted film professor Broderick Fox. His film, The Skin I’m In, is an official selection at this year’s Victoria Film Fest. Read full article.
Broderick Fox sought out Victoria, BC artist Rande Cook in The Skin I’m In.
THE SKIN I’M IN is one of Juror Barbara Hager’s Quick Picks for the 2013 Victoria International Film Festival. Check out all 19 staff/juror picks of the festival via the link below, and we’ll see you at the SKIN screening on Feb 2. 9:30 PM at The Vic!
http://
The Victoria Film Festival has just announced that the Canadian premiere of THE SKIN I’M IN on Saturday February 2nd, 2013 will be accompanied by an exhibition of the film’s featured artist, Victoria’s own Rande Cook, at Alcheringa Gallery. The exhibition will run February 2-10.
Check out the gallery show and then join us for the screening of THE SKIN I’M IN, 9:30PM at The Vic Theater.
**Filmmaker Broderick Fox, executive producer Lee Biolos, and Rande Cook will be in attendance**
Full details, addresses, and directions, along with information on what promises to be an extraordinary film festival program are accessible on the Victoria Film Festival Website: http://
Lively discussion around THE SKIN I’M IN after its screening at VISIBLE EVIDENCE XIX this afternoon. Screened in a beautiful art deco theater at the National Film and Sound Archive on the Australia National University campus in Canberra.
Visible Evidence is an amazing conference of documentary practitioners and scholars from around the world, convening for four days annually to present critical papers, screen works, and have conversations. More info here: http://www.visibleevidence2012.com
I had the chance to wear both my maker and scholar hats delivering a paper after the screening on performativity and autobiography as documentary strategies.
Such a special opportunity for me to screen and discuss SKIN with makers and scholars I’ve long admired and whom I use in the classroom with students.
On Saturday, November 17, the AJZ Space in Yerevan, Armenia hosted a screening party of THE SKIN I’M IN coordinated by The Screenery, PINK Armenia, Queering Yerevan, and talented filmmaker and scholar Anahid Yahijan (a former student of mine).
Approximately 25 attendees representing a range of hybrid nationalities, sexualities, and identities were in attendance and contributed to what sounds like a spirited and nuanced discussion of the film afterward. Anahid related many positive comments about the universality of various aspects of the story and an overall appreciation of its honesty. Two lines of critique and their ensuing debate at the event are especially interesting to me and worth sharing here.
Some of those in attendance questioned the cultural appropriation present in the film (my world travels, collaborating with a Kwakwaka’wakw artist to design a tattoo, and the return to indigenous notions of tattooing as ritual). In a globalizing world where Westerners like myself (coming from distinct legacies of privilege) are critical of the American status quo and seek out other historical and transcultural traditions as touchstones for a way of living, is this a sign of progress or simply of cultural hegemony and postmodern pastiche? My own answer would be that it all lies in intent, level of engagement, and the spirit of the interaction, and that we can get paralyzed in postcolonial theory and political correctness if we are not careful. This is an important conversation that I try to open up through the film and want to hear your thoughts on below.
A cohort of queer women at the screening were apparently put off by the multiple personas and frequent performative screen doublings I use to not only tell my own story but also to evoke past moments and encounters for which I have no footage. One woman referred to these strategies as grave betrayals of what many queer theorists have tried to fight: the notion that queerness is all about ego, a narcissistic mirroring of the self, and chalked the film up to an ultimate act of aesthetic narcissism that could have no larger social import due to its particularity to one individual’s story. Concerns about “unhealthy narcissism” area of course one that keeps any right-minded autobiographical filmmaker up some nights.
But it is worth unpacking the common levying of “narcissism” as a pejorative. In the psychoanalytic sense of the word, a healthy narcissism and mirroring of self in one’s parents is deemed vital for balanced social development. And yet mainstream culture has long denied queer identities such mirroring, as argued in the background clip on the Dr. Fox page of this site) My own hope is that in a digital age of self-disclosure on the streams of social media, that the film is in fact a return to the performative traditions of queer media (i.e. Marlon Riggs) and the autobiographical impulses of third-wave feminism (i.e. Vanalyne Green), where the crafting of such a piece returns a degree of self-reflection and retrospection into the act of digital autobiography, and that sites like this one and imfromdriftwood.com offer the opportunity for the sharing of personal stories to provide much-needed mirroring to underrepresented components of culture and opportunities for ongoing dialogue and debate.
Wherever people come in on my particular film, let’s at least be sure to exercise these digital potentials for dialogue! Check out the great photos of the event, host a screening party of your own, and join the conversation below.