BOOK OF SKIN

BOOK OF SKIN

Directed by Neil Kendricks

Surreal and provocative, artist-filmmaker Neil Kendricks experimental short film, “Book of Skin” reimagines the myth of Pygmalion with a gender-bending twist as an artist’s fantasies and nightmares expressed in her drawings suddenly appear as shape-shifting, phantasmagoric images on the body of an artist’s model during a life-drawing session. Inspired by the filmmaker’s observations teaching life-drawing classes, this unusual short film sets the bar high with the challenge of creating something that most viewers have never seen before: “Book of Skin” features actor-artists creating real drawings in real time while portraying fictional characters on camera in a scripted narrative. The film offers an intoxicating mixture of “cinema verite,” documentary style camerawork and surrealism. “Book of Skin” has won 12 awards – mostly for “Best Experimental Film” – on the international film-festival circuit so far.

Director Statement

What makes my experimental short film “Book of Skin” unique is all of the film’s artists/actors created real drawings on camera in order to capture a documentary realism within a scripted, fictional narrative. As a professional visual artist, writer, filmmaker and educator, I was committed to filming something that I have never seen before in a fictional film about artists and the creative process: Experienced visual artists creating drawings in real time while performing in a surreal story. As a result of making this decision regarding my mise-en-scene and approach, the film’s casting process took years to find the right visual artists who could create high-quality drawings while simultaneously being at ease in front of the camera as fictional, unnamed characters.

My screenplay and production design for “Book of Skin” were inspired by my years of teaching drawing at various colleges and universities, and bearing witness to the mysterious process and discovery of artists thinking on paper. I believe that I achieved my intent in this short film with its life-drawing session’s turn for the uncanny.

I hope you and your fellow film-festival programmers enjoy my offbeat short film. “Book of Skin” is my personal, cinematic love letter to the creative process of translating the three-dimensional world into two-dimensional images.

Director Biography

Neil Kendricks, Writer-Director-Co-Producer

Neil Kendricks is a filmmaker, artist, photographer, writer, educator and the former Film Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD). Kendricks earned a Master’s degree in Television, Film and New Media from San Diego State University in 2006. His award-winning short films like 2002’s “Loop” have screened at numerous international film festivals including the Palm Springs International Festival of Short Films, the Comic-Con International Independent Film Festival, the 2002 Havana Film Festival, and a special short-film screening at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival’s American Pavilion.

Kendricks’ photography has also been exhibited at the San Diego Museum of Art, the African-American Museum of Fine Arts, London’s Royal College of Art, and many other venues. His first solo photography exhibition, “Bruised Eye Candy” was shown at San Diego’s now-defunct Spacecraft gallery in February 2008. Kendricks also produced, production designed and storyboarded media theorist Jordan Crandall’s film, “Heatseeking,” which was shown at inSITE 2000 and exhibited in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s “BitStream” exhibition, the first digital-arts exhibition shown at a major American art museum.

Kendricks’ 2008 short, “Beholder” (co-directed with artist Jim Cavolt) screened at the 2009 San Diego Latino Film Festival and the Athens International Film & Video Festival. Kendricks is currently in production on the documentary-in-progress “Comics Are Everywhere!” and he was among the curators of 2014’s inaugural Filmatic Festival. An early version of Kendricks’ 2015 experimental short film “Memory Lines” was originally commissioned as an outdoor video installation for the 2015 Filmatic Festival at the University of California, San Diego. In 2015, Kendricks also collaborated with filmmaker and editor Carlos Pelayo on the experimental video “Wounded Sky,” which premiered as a video installation at San Diego’s Not an Exit gallery. Their collaboration was featured in San Diego CityBeat.

“Suspension” is a short film in Kendricks’ ongoing collaboration with Pelayo on a series of video-artworks titled “Elemental Magic.”

Kendricks’ select photography, drawings, and short films can be viewed on his Web site.

Kendricks and his friend and frequent collaborator, composer Mike Mare continue to work on their interdisciplinary art-and-music project “Temple of Story,” which was shown at the Oceanside Museum of Art from October 2021 to February 2022. The latest pieces in their “Temple of Story” project will be shown at the Lowe Mills Art Center in Huntsville, Alabama in June 2026.

Plays in

Into the Unknown: Horror, Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Shorts