We’re honored to announce that THE SKIN I’M IN won “Best Feature” and “Best in Fest” at the inaugural 2015 Tattoo Arts Film Festival in Saskatoon, Canada. So grateful that audiences responded to the film and its questions. Especial thanks to festival founder Mark A. Allard for his support of the film and his vision putting together this festival!
We’re pleased to announce that director Broderick Fox is one of 12 California artists awarded a 2014 Artistic Innovation Grant from the Center for Cultural Innovation. Fox will put the funds towards sound mixing on his next documentary ZEN & THE ART OF DYING.
Click here for a full press release about CCI, the grant, and Fox’s new film!
Thanks to The Occidental Weekly and staff writer Sarah Corsa for this thoughtful article on THE SKIN I’M IN and the boundaries of the professor’s body.
Students are generally unaware of their professors’ personal lives. The life experiences that inform their teaching and perspectives stay hidden so that students only see the effects on their syllabi. Occasionally, professors share opinions share campus issues or current events, but students still rarely see the events that shaped these ideas – unless they make an autobiographical documentary, of course. Read full article
O Canada! Check out another thoughtful review of THE SKIN I’M IN’s digital and DVD release in Gay Calgary Magazine.
A film that takes you down deep into the underbelly of one man’s struggle with identity, gender, sexuality, body image and alcohol will be readily available to view across the globe beginning October 1st.
The Skin I’m In is a candid, honest and raw autobiographical look at Broderick Fox’s brush with death in a Berlin subway terminal and rise to self-actualization.
“Being blunt about my story I can… entertain but potentially also help other people,” he says. “One of the gifts that sobriety has given me is the sense that honesty is a great liberator.”
In his film Fox, a world travelled gay university professor/film maker/erotic hairdresser/actor/singer and variety of other things journeys to Victoria, British Columbia to have First Nations artist Rande Cook design him a personal tattoo, commemorative of a lifetime of trial and achievement. Read full article
On Sunday Oct. 6, Los Angeles Filmforum presents the LA premiere of THE SKIN I’M IN, by Broderick Fox with a live pre-screening remix performance of the film’s score by composer Ronit Kirchman. Fox and Kirchman will both be in attendance for a Q&A following the screening.
Sunday October 6
Remix set at 7 PM
Screening at 7:30 PM
in the Spielberg Theater
at the historic Egyptian Theater in Hollywood
6712 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles CA 90028
Tickets: $10 general, $6 students/seniors; free for Filmforum members.
Available by credit card in advance from Brown Paper Tickets or at the door.
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Full details at http://
**For those not in Los Angeles, attend in spirit: THE SKIN I’M IN is available internationally on iTunes and Amazon Oct. 1**
Click here preview the soundtrack.
Los Angeles Filmforum is the city’s longest-running organization screening experimental and avant-garde film and video art, documentaries, and experimental animation. 2013 marks its 38th year.
Check out the great review of THE SKIN I’M IN’s DVD release in EDGE ON THE NET.
Fox offers his story with no sense of self-importance — this is not a vanity project. Rather, this film will speak to anyone who has felt shattered and engaged in the struggle to become whole. Fox shares his triumphs and his fears; from his story we might draw solace, even strength. Read full review
Thanks to Harvardwood, the Harvard University Entertainment Industry Affinity Group for this great interview, which comes out the week of our international iTunes digital and Amazon DVD release as well as the homecoming Los Angeles Premiere of THE SKIN I’M IN as part of LA Filmforum at the historic Egyptian Theater.
Q: In your film, you have a running theme of searching for spirituality. Where would you say your perspective stands now and how is it different from when you first began filming?
A: There are many different religions and philosophies that all seem to point to the same thing. Some people call it consciousness. I’ve come to realize that all of the pain in my life has come from separating myself from the rest of the world, creating duality. Feeling different or less than and withdrawing; looking to things like alcohol to fill a void rather than confronting pain or the aspects of life and culture that are causing it. In getting the tattoo and making this film, I now realize I created a pretty incredible rite of passage for myself, which has proven to be spiritual. Read full interview here
Thanks to NELA Art News for covering the Oct. 1 iTunes and DVD release and the Oct. 6 LA Filmforum Los Angeles Premiere of THE SKIN I’M IN. NELA arts is an organization of northeast Los Angeles galleries and artists and NELA Art NEws is a monthly publication profiling the events and personalities of this exploding region of arts activity in the city.
The film is THE SKIN I’M IN and was made by local NELA resident Broderick Fox. He likes to say it’s about the transformative power of art and the art of transformation. Brody not only lives in Northeast Los Angeles, but he has ben teaching at Occidental College for 10 years. He teaches Media Arts & CUlture, which covers the history, theory, and making of media. Read full article
In this American Film Institute Archive clip, Dustin Hoffman recalls the process of developing the external appearance of Dorothy Michaels for Tootsie (1982) and the concatenating effects of realizing his internal sense of self did not match the external reality of what even the studio’s elite hair and makeup teams could provide.
This clip points to several different personal and cultural questions I seek to explore in The Skin I’m In. We all likely agree at this point that judgments of beauty, femininity, or masculinity are not absolutes but rather culturally constructed. But it is one thing to know this intellectually and quite another to a) feel at peace with these metrics or b) to transcend their use as the driving measures of self or others.
If self is not to be fully found in our tyrannical minds or our ephemeral bodies, then where does it reside? Explorers of nonduality would say this question is itself a trap, as it remythologizes the existence of a singular, finite, knowable self.
Making this film and dividing my identity into multiple personas, each just as real and just as “me” as the next, has certainly helped me to understand the ways in which each of us restricts and binds ourselves through personal and cultural narratives.
But on the flip side, once we see that none of our experiences, diagnoses, personalities, hopes, resentments, possessions, and appearances can fully describe “self,” but rather serve as nodes or mapping points for the experience of consciousness, we begin to glimpse the infinite possibilities for adventure, experimentation, and play in life.
It is this sense of freedom that I think many of us are pointing to via the (albeit feeble) term “spirit”–a realm I held at arm’s length for some thirty years because “spirituality” seemed fettered to religion and dogma, not a path to possibility and play.
‘Tis true that a good play needs no epilogue, but it seems fitting to close a post on gender, performance, and identity with some Shakesepare:
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts…
–Jaques from Shakesepare’s As You Like It (Act II Scene 7)
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
