A 17-year-old tries to get an underage tattoo against his mom’s will.

Director’s Vision for ‘Baby Skin’

So many of my favorite short and feature films are personal, intimate stories. Baby Skin is inspired by slice-of-life films that manage to reveal change. Inspired by a real event that happened with my mom, this is my most personal film.
When I was becoming an adult, I had a hard time telling my mom I wanted a tattoo—I didn’t want to disappoint her, or so I thought. I waited until a day before my appointment to break the news—surprisingly, she nodded her head and said, “I’d like to pay for it.”
This interaction changed my life—it made me question my assumptions about my mom, myself, and the world. As someone who had undiagnosed mental health issues as a teenager, I wish I’d have had this experience earlier. What else could I have opened up to her about?
A decade later, I was still asking myself what led to such a dramatic misunderstanding of how she’d react. Did I really not want to disappoint her? Or did I just want control? Maybe I wanted some immature version of independence. I considered how my angsty teendom and fragile masculinity played into the situation. Baby Skin fictionalizes these ideas to explore the dynamic, but the basic idea stayed the same: I discovered the power of vulnerability that day.
This story is for teenagers but it’s also for people who have moved on, become their own people, and are gazing back at that stage of life. Despite death, change, or just plain-old family dynamics, I hope the tender shift in Cory and Patricia’s relationship inspires real hope that grace can come in unexpected places. Teenager, older, or younger, this revelation can never come soon enough.
The final song in the film is sung by my mom. Sometimes we joke about whether or not she grounded me too much as a kid and I’ve gotten more tattoos than I originally promised. We can still drive each other crazy. But the fact is, that day she showed me something that led to a new chapter for me. That’s something I want to share. This, simply put, is a story about defeating a disease that plagues us all: shame.