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A Short Mission: Skinship

Most of us yearn to be touched. We spend a large proportion of our lives trying to feel just a brush of skin. After all, we live in a hyper-technological state (which I am fully aware I’ve mentioned before but as filmmakers are utilising it for all their films, I kinda have to). Anyway, people’s hands spend more time attached to a metallic box that has swipey functions and a camera than they do locked into someone else’s. If you spend most of your time without contact, you could feel as cold and distant from the human race as a phone or laptop.

If you feel like this, then do not be afraid, Skinship is a film that will bring you back to your senses.

Directed by Nicola Wong, this is a beautiful and entirely sensual film about an almost dystopian world where human contact is pretty much nil. A woman feeling lost in this unfeelling and callous life, where even her husband doesn’t touch her, finds a way to feel like herself again. She visits a mysterious woman who, for a small price, reconnects her with her senses.

Wong’s utterly captivating film will send shivers down your own skin and that is largely the point. The narrative, filled with this exquisite imagery and drenched in these outstanding colours that enhance the experience, is sublimely done. Wong juxtaposes the colour of the sessions with the black, white and grey world that is abundant in our lead’s life – which adds more heat to the moments between the two women. There, Skinship focuses on this intense empty emotion and fills it up slowly. Like teasing the audience with this delicate feather, Wong is careful not to allow too much to slip too quickly – especially with the character who feels all her urges burst at once when she is finally attended too. Now, this may sound like it’s leading to sex but that’s where Wong’s direction cleverly works. This isn’t about sex, this is about tantric and sensual connection. It focuses on this fingertip brush that allows you to feel alive again. Pulled along by the riveting performance by Anna Marie Cseh, who captures the isolation and alien feeling as well as the re-vitalisation so beautifully.

Skinship is an awakening – evocative in every sense of the term – and the powerful short film is completely breath-taking.

Skinship is making it’s ways around festivals – make sure you feel alive again 

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