Skin Despair

“The summer I turned 13, I got a camera. I have only one video from that year. I don’t know if I erased everything or if I just wanted to forget.” Skin Despair shows a young girl lying in bed, casually recording herself. As we look at her while listening to these opening words, we know everything is about to change.

Mireia Vilapuig’s film is a powerful memoir of the year she became an adolescent. Playful images of walking on the beach or singing in front of the bathroom mirror are intertwined with her calm yet shocking words. She recalls random moments, like when she was thirteen and a man asked if she had ever spent a night in a luxury hotel. Or when a boy online kept guilting her into meeting him in real life.

All these memories are related in a composed manner. She has never told anyone before. Mireia’s silence and her restrained way of looking back at the past make these stories all the more distressing. They reveal how sexual violence is so casually intertwined in a girl’s life that it’s not even worth mentioning—it’s just another part of growing up. An engaging and urgent film about teenage girls growing up in a man’s world.