Skin

Skin (2018) is a twenty minute short and it won the Oscar for Best Live Action Short. Two films are often confused, so let us separate them at the start: Guy Nattiv made two different films called Skin around the same time. One is this short, the other is a feature starring Jamie Bell. Both concern racism and tattoos but they tell different stories. The feature comes from a real person, Bryon Widner, a former neo-Nazi who had his tattoos removed. This short is fiction. It begins in a supermarket. A black man smiles at a ten year old white boy at the checkout. That is all. The boy's father and his friends take it as something done to them, and from that day a war starts between two groups. The ending is the entire reason the film exists and it genuinely shocks. We will not describe it, except to say the punishment is not physical and is far crueller for it. What it builds in twenty minutes shows both what the short form can do and what the film is actually saying: hate is taught, and the person teaching it is doing it to his own child. It runs 20 minutes. Good for: short film, social drama, and hard material. Less good for: it contains racial slurs, gun violence and a deeply disturbing ending. Not for viewing with children.