Skins: The Politics of Intimacy in Contemporary European Cinema

The expansion and integration of the EU in the last two decades has brought forth cultural imaginations of a more inclusive and diverse Europe that are both exhilarating and dangerous.  Recent films underscore the potential for promoting human rights but also for increasing racialized and xenophobic tensions.  The films we discuss,  Fremde Haut (A. Maccarone, 2005), La Petite Jerusalem (K. Albou, 2005), Princesas (F. Leon de Aranoa, 2006), Das Fräulein (A. Staka, 2006), and Auf der anderen Seite (2007), grapple with these contradictory imaginations of the European future by featuring “illegal” migrant characters in intimate relationships with European citizens. The migrant figures in these films become what Sara Ahmed has termed “melancholy migrants,” whose unhappiness reveals the effects of racism and xenophobia. Our paper examines filmic representations of transnational desire and migrant bodies as sites that embody the simultaneously expanding and contracting notions of Europeanness in the mid-2000s. Skin contact becomes a metaphor for exploration of political questions around citizenship, race, legality, and, beyond that, European inclusion of the other. In their dramatic focus on forbidden or non-sanctioned intimate relationships, cinematic depictions signal a departure from past models of belonging and a desire to envision a new kind of Europe.