EIFF 2021: The Man Who Sold His Skin

Rarely has the West's wilful exploitation of the Middle East been so audaciously represented, or so deliciously mocked, as in Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania’s new film

Film Review by Anahit Behrooz | 27 Aug 2021
  • The Man Who Sold His Skin
Film title: The Man Who Sold His Skin
Director: Kaouther Ben Hania
Starring: Yahya Mahayni, Dea Liane, Koen De Bouw, Monica Bellucci
Release date: 24 Sep

In 2007, Belgian artist Wim Delvoye – infamous for tattooing pigs in the name of artistic genius – turned his needle to the then-unknown Tim Steiner, inscribing an image of the Madonna across his back that was subsequently sold to a German collector for €150,000. Delvoye’s problematic interrogation of materiality and the boundaries of artistic ownership is the inspiration for Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Man Who Sold His Skin, in which Syrian refugee (Yahya Mahayni) enters into a Faustian contract with artist Jeffrey Godefroi, offering his back as canvas in exchange for a visa to reunite with his long-lost love.

The fetishization of Middle Eastern pain, the avant-garde’s hypocritical proximity to power, and European art's thorny relationship with image-making and objectification are all exhilaratingly eviscerated under Ben Hania’s merciless eye, which returns the West's arrogant gaze with fearless abandon. Eschewing recycled narratives of victimhood and trauma in favour of biting satire, Ben Hania paints the European commodification of the refugee crisis as a world of preening collectors and critics, incapable of imagining political engagement beyond their own creative experimentation. At the centre of it all is Sam – a revelatory performance from Mahayni – whose ironic defiance rebels against their control at every turn.

As the art scene clamours to ontologically dismember his body, Ben Hania’s camera slyly mimics their insatiable dehumanisation only to resist it, lingering instead in close-ups of the charismatic narrowing of Sam's eyes, the vital bob of his Adam’s apple. Cinematographer Christopher Aoun suffuses the screen with Renaissance blues and blood reds, crafting a delectable visual landscape that lends Sam’s journey the allegorical potency of the very same European art history that shackles him.

“Do you know the Pygmalion story?” Godefroi demands. “Well, our story is completely the opposite”. Yet while Godefroi may not carve Sam from stone into flesh, he and Galatea have more in common than he thinks, both cautionary tales about the pitfalls of solipsism in the artistic gaze. Moments after, Godefroi and Sam enter an operating theatre – Godefroi frantic with worry – to surgically pop a pimple that is obscuring Sam’s million-dollar tattoo. Rarely has the West's wilful exploitation of the Middle East been so audaciously represented, or so deliciously mocked.


The Man Who Sold His Skin received its UK premiere at Edinburgh International Film Festival, and is released in UK cinemas on 24 Sep via Studio Soho