France , 2015
Skinhearts
France , 2015
about my future , about who I really was and what it was that I really wanted to do . I had to deal with some personal issues related to my race that had made me someone afraid to be center stage . And also overcome the gender stereotypes : I had never thought about directing as a career for me , no one had ever told me I could do it nor that I couldn ’ t neither … But it is something very unconscious , it is deeply accepted in our society and we don ’ t talk about it enough . I have no regrets , but I wish no other girls and women would feel that they haven ’ t started their careers earlier because of that . So after working on my level of self-esteem , I realised I had plenty of things I wanted to say , to talk about , to transmit and that film was the medium , no matter how scared I was of taking full responsibility of the outcome of a film production .
We want to take a closer look at the genesis of your film : how did you come up with the idea for Skinhearts ?
I ’ ve always thought that being very sensitive was a curse ! And now I can see how it is the birthplace of my unique experience of this world . And that is where Skinhearts comes from , my experience living in Amsterdam and the average touch behaviour of the Dutch . I had been living almost 2 years in Amsterdam at that time and feeling as if I was getting colder and colder in my inside or something was getting heavier to live with , but could not point to what that feeling was exactly . One day I met someone who talked to me about a script with a lot of sex in it and about why he wanted to do that project and his own ideas of sexual freedom and stuff like that . When I left this meeting I had a horrible feeling . I was almost shocked not by the sex itself or the lack of any love involved in it , but more by the objectification of it .
Because of the lack of care and how it felt as a tool , just like a hammer to place a nail on a wall . Right after this meeting I was cycling home and I saw the end scene of Skinhearts