The Skin I’m In (Broderick Fox, 2012)

Feature documentary (85 min)

Kanopy (subscription required): https://www.kanopy.com/product/skin-im

Educational Web Initiative: http://skiniminmovie.com/web-initiative/

Synopsis:
In 2005, filmmaker Broderick Fox was found on the Berlin subway tracks with his head split open and a lethal blood alcohol level of 0.47. Strangers pulled him to safety, giving him a second chance at life and propelling him on a global journey to explore the limits of body, mind, spirit and art. Spanning Germany, Canada, Japan, Kenya, and the United States, the film chronicles Fox’s collaborations with Canadian First-Nations artist Rande Cook and African-American artist Zulu, who help him memorialize his experiences in a full back tattoo. In our digital age where personal confession and self-exposure abound, Fox instead transforms his experiences into art, making a film that is both innovative and accessible.

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
Coming out as an American teenager in the early 1990’s was a strange and frightening time. It was the height of the AIDS crisis and news was breaking about Jeffrey Dahmer coercing boys my own age home from the mall and dismembering them. My survival mechanism was to come out to friends and family on principle but to never act on my sexuality.

Alienated by organized religion, I made the mistake of forsaking any personal cultivation of spirit. Years of steady outward success (valedictorian, ivy league college, two advanced degrees, a professorship) masked the encroaching tyranny of intellect over my body and spirit.

In a world of uncertainty, the one thing I had absolute control over was my body. I drove it to extremes: anorexia, compulsive exercise, cutting, smoking, and finally, drinking. Feeling like my integrated, gay self was denied by family and culture, I created and managed a series of compartmentalized personas to express the various aspects of self that were being repressed. Brody the son and brother, Dr. Fox the professor, and Broderick Fox the artist were soon joined by Rick the club kid, and Dina Brown the drag queen.

These performances were exhilarating at first, but with no sense of spirit outside of self and the management of these multiple performances becoming more and more unwieldy, things began to come apart. Rick became a sex worker, all of us became alcoholics, I became a stranger to myself, and my body finally reached its breaking point in the Berlin subway on July 23, 2005.

The Skin I’m In is my first solo feature documentary. It is the latest in a series of unflinching autobiographical works I call “embodied media” in which I use my personal stories and physical body to challenge cultural assumptions and norms around sex, gender, and sexuality and to break the often-strangling silence of shame.

Autobiography has long been an act of privilege for powerful or famous men with access to the means to document and distribute their stories—stories structured around superlative acts and accomplishments, not shame, doubt, or failure.

In our social media moment we’re all suddenly autobiographers and media makers. Opining, ranting, confessing, and exposing have become daily rituals. So why do so many of us still feel so alone, unheard, ashamed, and ambivalent? I want to restore a sense of political urgency, critical reflection, artistry and play to acts of digital autobiography.

Yes, The Skin I’m In is about me. But I want it to start a dialogue: a global conversation about the aspects of self we rarely talk about—issues of identity, past trauma, creative frustration, addiction, alienation—revealing that power, purpose, artistry, even momentary states of grace, await beyond these cultural and private wars.

Keywords: LGBTQ, autobiography, documentary, indigenous, intersecionality, race