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ANTHONY FABIAN on his new film Skin

Skin is the true story of Sandra Laing, born to white parents in apartheid South Africa, but who herself had brown skin and appeared be black.  At the time, racial designation laws were based on the race of the parents so whe was categorized as white, later, however, when she began school she was reclassified as black.  Her father, however, fought to have her reclassfied as white again, the subject of a famous lawsuit.  This story is about Sandra's effort to forge an identity, the absurdity of race and the pain of familial loss.

Director Anthony Fabian began his career in film in music, on films such as Hillary and Jackie about the renowned cellist Jaqueline Dupre.  Here he discusses what drew him to make this film.

So how did you get involved in the story?

Well very simply, I listen to BBC radio 4 in my kitchen almost every morning and there was an interview with Sandra Laing and it sounded very fascinating: the idea of an African looking child of two white parents in South Africa during apartheid.  As I listened to her story I became more and more gripped by it.  I was very moved and tears were streaming down my face and by the end of the interview I thought I had to do something with this.  

It was clear to me that it was an immense and very powerful story with all kinds of resonances that I didn't fully understand at the time. In fact, it took so long to get the film made, I've had a lot of time to think of what the implications of the story are.  But it was really that instant recognition  of something that I always thought makes great cinema which is a small personal story set against a very big political canvas.  And I think the best way to tell stories that are about important issues like racism and so on is through the personal, is through getting people involved emotionally with the characters and not being too polemical about it.

How did you get the film made?

First, we had to get the script right and that took a long time because the story spans 30 years, and it's a very complicated story and there are many events in Sandra's life which we weren't able to include.   I knew that the reconciliation between mother and daughter was the emotional watershed of the film, the thing that allowed Sandra to move on in her life, to become whole.  So everything in a way had to build to that reconciliation.    On the other hand we also had to deal with the whole complex issues of South Africa's racial classification system which would have been unfamiliar to most people who didn't live there or didn't experience it.   It's one of the more Kafkaesque aspects of the story, how she goes from being officially white to officially colored to officially white to being colored again and you know all those arbitrary definitions and the arbitrary ways in which they were measured, like the pencil test (putting a pencil in one's hair) and the color of the gums, for example.  So that took a very long time and quite a few writers.

Once we had a script that seemed to be working it became possible first of all to go out and cast.  Sophie Okonedo had just been nominated for an Oscar (Hotel Rwanda) so it seemed like she could actually mean something to financiers and she loved the script straight away and became attached to it.  And then after that began the building blocks of pulling the financing together: pre sales to different countries based on the script and the story,  a little bit of funding from the South African government, some private equity and some British gap financing.  So it was piecemeal in the way that a lot of independent films are financed and it took a couple of years after Sophie got on board.

So did you get the life rights first?

Six weeks after hearing the story on the radio I was on a plane to Johannesburg.  I had made contact with Sandra via phone, her neighbor had a phone...you see that in the film she doesn't actually have a phone herself and that was just inspired by my own experience.  I asked if she might be interested in the possiblity of a feature film about her life. (There have been two previous documentaries)  She said would there be any money in it for me and she agreed to meet me.  I felt very strongly that...one of things that had struck me about the story was that her white family had clearly prospered and she had ended up in the gutter.  And even at the time that I spoke to her she was living in a rented house, 2 rooms, family of 5 and she had nothing.  I felt that some kind of reparation needed to be made because really her only crime was not being white...

...and not really being black either, not clearly being one or the other.

And you can see from Obama all the trouble that's gotten him into.

Americans are a mixed race, it's very complicated because there's an insistence that we're not and that's what interested me about this story.  I know for example how laws were written in the 18th century and beyond to enforce racial designations.

The film was shown recently to the South African parliament and there were many speeches  made by the Ministers and one of them said he loved that the characters were not portrayed as either good or bad, irrespective of their color.  For him that was, the message of the film was that all human beings are the same, we're not good, we're not bad, regardless of what race we are or appear to be.  The message of South Africa is that we are bound together by our common humanity not by the things that divide us.  So I was very very pleased that that had come across.

I really loved the story and the way you told it was nonjudgmental, without cartoon villainy.

It's very hard to do a story about race and remain subtle because it's not a subtle subject.  Racism is not a subtle subject.

So after you got Sandra to give you her life rights...

She agreed to the life rights and I basically went on a mission to make a difference for her.  Various people asked me if  there was a book, and I realized that there should be.  So I immediately went to a publisher, the new imprint of Miramax films thinking there would be a possible tie in between the book and the film and the publisher agreed to publish her story.  An American writer, Judy Stone, started writing Sandra's biography, and she and I worked quite closely together in terms of the research she did.  It also enabled me to hand quite a substantial advance to Sandra and so with that she was able buy her first house in quite a nice neighborhood.  She was living in a township before and now she's living in a suburb basically.  She had a rented space and now she owns it and the house is worth 5 times what it was when she bought it, so she has some equity in the world and I think that was a really great start for the project...to make quite a significant difference early on.  I suppose it gave it good karma.

What a wonderful thing to do.  At the end of the movie she's selling stuff from her store.

Yes, that was something.  Once she had her house we told her she was going to get some money from the film but it could take a long time and asked what she was going to do in them meantime.  She came up with the idea of having a shop and we got a bit of sponsorship to help her convert her garage into a shop.  She ran it quite successfully until the zoning laws changed in her neighborhood and she was forced to close it down.  A shame, obviously we didn't have time to go into it in the film.  The film is hard enough as it is, we wanted to leave a little bit of hope in there. 

It sounds like you really have a relationship with her.

Oh yes, it's not a question of here's the check, thank you, goodbye.  It's an ongoing friendship.

Before you heard the story, did you have any contact with South Africa or had you heard about…

I knew almost nothing about South Africa except for what we all knew when we were boycotting Barclays (bank) or not eating Cape grapes.  I knew the basics about segregation and so on and that it was country based on racial inequality.  It was a massive learning curve for me from the start.  What drew me was the story and then I realized I had to learn everything I possibly could about the country, its history and it's culture in order to do the film justice.  I'm really pleased that South Africans recognize the film as authentic and genuine and respectful of their culture and not at all a kind of raping of their important story.  So I think that was an advantage of having taken quite a long time was that it gave me a chance to catch up in my knowledge and develop a relationship with the country.  

So how did you get your other cast members?

Alice Krige would have bitten her hand off to do it.  It's such a great part and she's the only actress with an Afrikaans background to have had a career in Hollywood.  I thought of her right at the beginning, she was my very first choice obviously for financial reasons we had to explore other areas but at the end I was so glad to be able to come back to her.  I knew I had to have a touchstone for the other actors if we were gonna have someone like Sam Neill or Sophie Okonedo who are not South African, I had to have one of those 3 characters be a reference point for the other 2 and that's why I insisted on casting Alice because she grew up there until she was 16, her parents are Afrikaners. 

Sam had almost all his scenes with Alice.  That worked out really well.  It was just a case  that he was somebody who I thought would be able to crack the accent because the South African and the New Zealand accent isn't that different relatively speaking compared to say American and South African.  His agent happened to be a big fan of the script and I think he encouraged Sam to look at it and take it seriously.  Sam's sister in law is African American and his wife is Japanese and they have a bi-racial child and I think he had an instinct  and attraction to the story for those reasons as well.

Are there any other implications of the story you'd like to discussed?

What drew me was the family dynamic of the parents an the child,  the incredible sense of rejection and loss when Sandra's father rejected her and the desperate need she felt to reunite with her mother.  That for me was the core that I first identified, that first drew me.  But the more I went into it, it was essentially a story about indentity and belonging and something I hadn't thought about particularly, about incredibly tribal we are as human beings.  How we have this  need to indentify ourselves with a particular group from that leads to wider implication of the politics of identitiy.  When you look at what Obama went through to get elected it was as much about convincing people that he was of their tribe and that he belonged as it was about his policies.  Those are the kinds of reverberations that revealed themselves to me as I got deeper into the story.  And now I see it everywhere, I see discussions of identity and belonging in every corner of our society whether it's when we're talking about terrorists or immigrants, asylum seekers, illegal undocumented workers, religious groups.  These questions of inclusion or exclusion within our society are so central to the story because Sandra has this journey from the white world to the black world to trying to be in a world where it doesn't matter whether your white or black what matters is that you're a human being.  I think that's the journey  that we're all trying to go on now, trying to cope with this natural innate instinct to identify with a particular group and to be identified with a group and at the same time to be inclusive and not exclusive: diversity and multiculturism as opposed to separation.

What are your hopes for the film?

I honestly believe the sky is the limit for this film if it's given a chance.  First, I know that it touches people emotionally.  I think it has immense educational potentional.  I have been approached by a number of educational institutions whether it's universites or schools.  We actually started and educational program here in the U.K. with downloadable resources for schools.  The areas it touches on in terms of education has to do with these questions of social cohesion and communities.  It touches on the history of apartheid because it very well illustrates some of the ways apartheid functioned and the legal aspects of apartheid.   It 's also very interesting on the question of genetics because people often question whether it's possible for a black child to be born of white parents.  The mechanism that are involved are quite interesting and quite interesting to study.  So there are lots of areas in which it can be used as a teaching tool, is being used and will be used as a teaching tool. 

We've also been nominated for something called the Time for Peace Award which is something that's judged by 25 UN ambassadors.  Previous recipients are things like Schindler's List and A Mighty Heart.  So it has the potential to be a beacon for harmony and peace.  I think it's potential is vast if the gatekeepers will simply let us in.   It's very hard to get the distributors to actually attend these screenings.   They don't trust the way that festival audiences respond, they think there's something skewed about a festival audience.  

Eggheads?

I just think they're normal human beings, these are ordinary people who are voting with their feet.  It was 1st runner up for the people's choice at AFI.  It had a score of 9.5 out of 10 at St. Louis.  This would not be happening if it didn't have merit and it did not have a public that would enjoy it.  But it's very hard to communicate that to people holding the purse strings.

Did the story change the way you think about your own identity?

The film (and the resistance there persists in releasing it) has taught me a lot about the racism that is still out there in the world.  For example, Obama had to spend a great deal of his campaign persuading people to look at him first and foremost as a man and as a politician, not as a 'black' man. Nevertheless, when he was elected, the chief reaction was 'American's first black president.' (Never mind that he is half black and half white.) Again, it comes back to that question, central to SKIN - what do these definitions really mean?It has also made me much more aware of how many people feel marginalised by society and that  no matter who we are, we are all 'outsiders' in one context or another. 

Skin will be shown this week at the Palm Springs Film Festival and then later in the month at the Santa Barbara Film Festival.