SKIN IN FLAMES is pretension at the movies run amok. You can tell what you're in for when we get the image of the naked black female Christ- figure earl on. The piece then develops through parallel (or are they) dialogues between celebrity photographer Jaenda and journalist for the emerging 3rd. World country's one surviving newspaper, Lidia Nené and pervert U. N. official Fernando Tejero and his black mistress Ella Kweku which for no particular reason end with them in the same space. The film is big on perverse detail.
The issue of photographers from wealthy countries exploiting their colonial subjects got a much better innings in movies around the 1983 mark - UNDER FIRE etc. In case we haven't got it, the shot of the naked Vietnamese girl running with napalm burns is included in the material projected on the characters half way through.
This one is nasty, exploitative and awkward - a bad combination.
