SKINDEEP
2021 · 4m
Directed by YUCA, Edi, YOUTH
Genres: animation, documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, dark, melancholic
Watercolor animation painted over a century of newspaper articles about racial discrimination brings race-based trauma to the surface.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A century of newsprint + watercolor sounds precious on paper, but the three-director collective actually pulls off something genuinely unsettling—they're not making a statement, they're letting the archive *speak* while the painting deliberately refuses to beautify it.
SKINDEEP understands its formal ancestry (essay film, documentary painting, archival collage) and executes with rigor: the watercolor isn't decoration but a dialogic material that interrogates its own relationship to the text beneath, positioning this squarely in a lineage from Harun Farocki through contemporary documentary practice.
The decision to let newsprint remain legible *through* the watercolor—rather than obscuring it—does the entire thematic work; that single choice of translucency over opacity transforms a potentially didactic premise into something visceral about how trauma remains visible even when we try to paint over it.
Reviews
“SKINDEEP” is an emotive animated short film, directed by YUCA , Edi , and YOUTH , that brings race-based trauma to the surface. It was co-written with Dr.