Interviewing Kristina Rodemann, Director of 'Skin Hunger’

'Skin Hunger' is a short film from 2019, selected among the films that the Regional Office for Central America, North America and the Caribbean has screened on the occasion of the Global Migration Film Festival in 2020. ‘Skin Hunger’ tells the story of a Mexican woman, Ximena, who works in the United States to support her family in Mexico. Ximena suffers from the distance from her loved ones, the loneliness she feels in her new home and the lack of human contact and warmth.

The director Kristina Rodemann explains the experiences and reflections that inspired her artistic process and the making of the short film.

Your short film dissociates itself from purely economic discourses and confronts the psychological consequences of migration. Is cinema the ideal space to discuss the mental wellbeing of migrants? What are the benefits that cinema can offer in this respect?

Above all, cinema is emotional and seeks to capture the unspoken, non-explicit reality - what we feel, what we don't say to our faces, what we want to say but hold back, what we desire, what we fear... When we go to see a movie and witness emotions that we know and share, it is wonderful. We recognize ourselves in characters that have nothing to do with us, feeling their hopes and fears as if they were our own. The arts, in general, help us to see beyond our own reality and to empathize with the other, but it seems to me that cinema has something very visceral, immediate, and urgent that can transmit the migratory experience in a nuanced, complex, and humanizing way.

In a scene from her short film, the protagonist watches a video of her son on her cell phone and caresses the screen as if she could touch him. However, this does not help her fight loneliness, but rather increases her lack of physical contact. How 'physical' is mental wellbeing?

There are medical studies that indicate that physical contact foments the creation of the hormone of pleasure and wellbeing, oxytocin. Neuroscientists at the University of Virginia have discovered that physical contact increases the pain threshold, the ability to cope with stressful situations. Even a stranger that touches your hand can help lower your body's cortisol levels. I am not a psychologist, doctor, or neuroscientist, but I have lived first-hand that lack of contact affects mental health. When you lack physical contact, it's like not having a home- you lose your sense of belonging and identity. You can't think beyond the uneasiness you feel.

The protagonist of the story is a woman. Does narrating migration through female characters open the door to new reflections? Or do you consider that the choice of sex was not so relevant to the flow of the story?

It is curious because when I was developing the idea and the script, there were people who told me that it was a very "feminine" story, because the character is a mother and above all because the idea that Ximena was looking for something more primary and basic than sex was understood as a feminine "problem". However, after screening the short film, the most effusive reactions were from men who told me, with emotion, that they felt the same. We are still not used to considering the female point of view in the first person and understanding that it has universal relevance. There is still much to discover through this view.

Where did you find inspiration for your work? Why are you interested in the theme of migration? What is the main message you wanted to convey through your work?

I recently experienced a deep, physical solitude when I arrived in a new city and started a life from scratch. In spite of being the daughter of migrants, of having started from scratch in several different cities and countries throughout my life, it was the first time I felt such discouragement, a sense of loss and disorientation that I felt in my bones, in my skin, even in my hair - all over my body. A psychologist suggested that I was experiencing a delayed grief, a pile of grief for all the goodbyes I had to say that I hadn't been able to process. I am aware that everytime I have migrated it has always been by choice and with the privilege of being able to choose my destiny, but this experience made me think of dear friends who migrated out of necessity, from Kenya, Ukraine, Bolivia, Colombia... in search of a better future for their family. When I was talking to a Romanian friend, she asked me if I could make a short film about "women like us" and from there the idea was born-a film about a migrant person, yes, but more than that, about a woman like my friend, like me, like all of us.