Skin

'Skin' is an attempt to address the subject of racial violence in a challenging and original way, both in content and in form. My first concern was to explore dimensions of the subject hitherto neglected by the medium, specifically the psychological and social consequences of such violence for people involved. My belief is that these are aspects either partially or completely ignored by a medium which perceives racial violence as a 'problem' which has 'solutions'. Such thinking inevitably leads to personal experience being seen as illustrative of and secondary to the contexts in which it occurs. In television terms this means personal testimony being used as the 'human interest' around which politicians, pressure groups and other interested third parties can have their say. My first choice was to exclude these third parties, to return the experience to the peoples themselves. Suddenly there were nuances and ambiguities. There were complex ideas about history, power, attraction and repulsion (often simultaneous). To challenge further the viewer´s preconceptions of what 'a film about racial violence' would be like I opted to make the film deliberately static, beautiful and calm. Hence the choice of the Super 16 format. Most controversially I wanted to implicate the viewer in the processes of the film. Since the film was at one level about people making judgements about others on the basis of their appearance I threaded a white male throughout the film. He seemed to articulate the prejudices and hatreds of white racists and presumably allowed some viewers to feel themselves morally superior and detached from such superficial opinions. In fact, as revealed at the end of the film, the man was himself a 'victim' of racial violence, his teenage son having been knifed to death by a gang of Asians in an unprovoked attack.