When Fox Searchlight Pictures, the specialty division of 20th Century Fox known for high-profile features like 12 Years a Slave and The Shape of Water, started “acquiring” shorts late last year, our eyebrows raised. Acquisitions of shorts are still somewhat rare in America where there is little appetite for them on TV or in theaters. What was Searchlight going to “do” with these shorts? Was it simply a play for cheap Oscar statuettes?

After initially picking up A.V. Rockwell’s Feathers and Shelly Lauman’s Birdie at TIFF 2018, the acquisitions continued into 2019 with site alum Matthew Puccini’s Lavender out of Sundance. On stage at our SW:IRL offline event Puccini mentioned that Fox would be putting their newly acquired shorts online to help build out their digital promotion channels, a notion confirmed the next day by Fox Searchlight co-president Nancy Utley in a quote given to Indiewire. This week that strategy comes to fruition as the initiative debuts on YouTube and Facebook with the release of Guy Nattiv’s Skin, fresh off of last month’s Oscar win. 

Debuting with the reigning Oscar winner is a buzzy splash for the company, but unfortunately Skin is…not a good film. This isn’t simply some anti-Oscar contrarianism from us, the film, a violent tale of American white supremacy and the perpetuation of cycles of hate and violence, is simultaneously vulgar and tone deaf. Rather than articulate the reasons more fully, I’ll just point you to this piece in Slate titled, “Green Book’s Best Picture Win Wasn’t the Most Embarrassing Oscar Victory. This Was.“

If you still do want to watch the film and decide for yourself, we’ve embedded it below. Fox plans to be releasing one short a month on its YouTube and Facebook pages. Checking in with non-American members of our team, it seems as though the film’s YouTube is geo-restricted, but the Facebook version is not.  Whether this will be the case with all the Searchlight Shorts is still to be determined, and we’ll update you when we learn more.