WomenCinemakers vol V WomenCinemakers vol V | Page 36

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