Thanks to Tee S. Hawkins and Kenya Gales over at Queer 2 the T, PR Radio’s top-ranking show, for a great interview about The Skin I’m In. Tee’s great questions led to an in-depth conversation about body, identity, spirituality, and intergenerational perspectives in the digital-age LGBTQ community. We also talk in depth about the amazing work of featured artists and collaborators Rande Cook and Zulu, and I share new information about my next film project Zen & the Art of Dying and its queer central character, the pioneering Zenith Virago.
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
Thanks to Anthem Magazine and writer Kee Chang for this great interview leading up to the Oct. 1, 2013 International Digital Release of THE SKIN I’M IN on iTunes and Amazon.
In 2005, at the age of 31, Broderick Fox was found unconscious on the tracks of a Berlin subway station with his head split open and a lethal blood alcohol level of 0.47. As it turns out, Fox had destroyed an entire bottle of vodka and later proceeded to fall onto the tracks—a walking blackout. The Skin I’m In concerns a human work-in-progress chronicling decades of bodily shame, addiction and suppressed sexual identity, which led to what Fox refers to as “the bottom”. Read full article
Thanks to Kilian Melloy for a great interview and write-up on THE SKIN I’M IN in Edge Magazine.
A few years ago, filmmaker Broderick Fox was, pretty much literally, a broken man. Now he’s whole, healthy — and the living canvas for an intricate, powerful tattoo. Fox’s own life is the canvas for his resonant new film.
“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.
Victoria Film Festival 2013 Interview – THE SKIN I’M IN director Broderick Fox
by Jason Whyte
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
Please tell me about the technical side of the film; your relation to the film’s cinematographer, what the film was shot on and why it was decided to be photographed this way.
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.
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.
“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 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**
