"Fremde Haut" ("Unveiled") is the story of Fariba, a young Iranian woman who flees her homeland after being revealed as a lesbian and faced with the death penalty. She seeks political asylum in Germany, but her application is refused and she's sent to a refugee detention center in Frankfurt. When her cellmate dies, she assumes his identity and begins working illegally in Germany disguised as a man. Complications ensue when Fariba falls for Anne and the two work out a plan to escape from their unsatisfying lives.
Of her film, director Angelina Maccarone remarked in a press release:
What interests me is the inalterable and the alteration of one’s own identity. The fact that Fariba (Jasmin Tabatabai) is forced to assume a different identity, to transform herself into a foreign body, adds even more gravity to the condition of exile. She has to submit, not only to an external exile, but also to an internal one. She offers herself as a projection surface for prejudices but against all expectancy, she rises above all the rules of prohibition; she is the bearer of a secret, a personality with a mind of its own concealed behind a prescribed mask.
"Angelina Maccarone's "Unveiled" offers a wise, uncompromising portrait of oppression in all its physical and psychological manifestations. [...] The film is built around a brilliant performance by Jasmin Tabatabai, who slips on her masculine attributes as though they were a second skin and whose expressive face registers every change in her environment as though it were a child's, seeing the world for the first time." -- Los Angeles Weekly, 2005
Catch "Fremde Haut" if you have time!
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