Highlights:
-
Urvashi Pathania’s short film Skin uses horror to explore colourism, set in a clinic where melanin is harvested as a commodity.
-
The film was inspired by Pathania’s childhood experience of being bleached at age nine after relatives said her dark skin could affect marriage prospects.
-
She frames the story as “economic horror,” connecting skin bleaching to wider systems of exploitation and cultural plunder.
-
The narrative follows two sisters: Ria, who champions skin positivity, and Kanika, who chooses to bleach her skin.
- Advertisement - -
Skin was workshopped at the Sundance Labs and is being developed into a feature-length film by Urvashi Pathania.
Filmmaker Urvashi Pathania has spoken openly about how a personal childhood experience of skin bleaching inspired her acclaimed short film Skin. The project, which was workshopped at the Sundance Labs and is now being developed into a feature-length production, uses horror to address the social and cultural issue of colourism.
The film places audiences inside a grotesque clinic where melanin is extracted and sold as a commodity. For Urvashi Pathania, the use of horror is not just about creating fear, but about showing how prejudice and exploitation are inherited and reinforced within communities.
Urvashi Pathania’s Childhood Bleaching Experience
The central image of Skin—a woman submerged in a fluorescent tank as her skin dissolves—comes directly from Urvashi Pathania’s earliest memory of being bleached. “I was nine when one of my mum’s friends said, ‘Cute kid, but you need to do something about her dark skin if you ever want her to get married,’” she recalled.
Her fair-skinned mother acted on the comment. “She put a homemade bleaching paste on me,” Pathania explained. “And I remember screaming in the bathtub.” That moment, of being altered without choice, became the foundation of Skin. As she put it, “That early sense of being trapped, of a body altered without consent, became the ghost at Skin’s core.”
The Story of Sisters in Skin
The short film begins with two sisters, Ria and Kanika, before moving into the world of the clinic. Ria is a dark-skinned influencer who promotes skin positivity, while Kanika is determined to bleach her skin. “Ria is the voice of the audience,” Urvashi Pathania said. “We enter through her disbelief and the love that’s tangled up in it.”
The clinic, named Markandeya, reveals a system where dark-skinned women are drained of melanin, which is then channelled into glowing vats for wealthier clients. The process becomes a metaphor for resource exploitation, linking beauty standards to larger economic structures.
Urvashi Pathania on Colourism as Economic Horror
For Urvashi Pathania, colourism cannot be seen only as a matter of personal insecurity. “I wanted it to feel bigger than skin bleaching,” she explained. “It’s about harvesting, of resources, of culture, of beauty rituals. Whether it’s the brown earth being plundered or the bodies of women of colour being commodified, the cost is always disproportionately ours.”
This perspective also shaped the visual design of the film. Working with cinematographer Catherine, Urvashi Pathania used light as a metaphor. “Horror films usually hide terror in darkness. But here, the whitest moment is the most terrifying,” she said. The fair-skinned clients appear in warm amber light, while women of colour are exposed under stark fluorescent lighting. “It was the only way to show the truth of what Kanika loses,” she added.
Inherited Cycles and Family Pressures
The film also explores how colourism is passed through families. Kanika’s wish to resemble her fair-skinned mother highlights the way cultural preferences for lighter skin intertwine with family relationships. “We like to blame our parents,” Urvashi Pathania explained, “but we carry it too. These cycles don’t just live in the past. They’re active.”
This cycle is reinforced in the film’s climax, where Ria, the sister who embraces her dark skin, tries to save Kanika but is trapped instead. She is drained for the benefit of others. “One person might individually gain—lighter skin, different treatment—but society pays,” Pathania noted. “Every time a new standard is set, it hurts women as a whole.”
Characters and Symbolism in Skin
The clinic’s director, Juniper, represents a system of exploitation masked as empowerment. “She’s complicit and trapped,” said Urvashi Pathania. “In the feature version, you see the strings go even higher.”
Another powerful scene shows older women preparing to bathe in stolen melanin, unaware of the violence behind it. “They don’t know the cost,” she explained. “They hear about a fountain of youth and want it. That desire is universal. The tragedy is that the system allowing it is invisible to them.”
When asked to summarise Skin, Urvashi Pathania referred to a parallel between Ria applying foundation too light for her skin and Kanika undergoing bleaching. “It’s the same violence in different forms,” she said. “One is subtle, one is grotesque. But both come from being told you’re not enough.”
View this post on Instagram
Urvashi Pathania’s Future Projects
Although Skin is a short, it is the foundation of a larger story. Urvashi Pathania has developed a feature script through the Sundance Labs and is preparing to expand the narrative. She is also working on other genre projects, including a ghost story about housing injustice in Manhattan.
For her, horror is not just a tool for fear but a political language. As she explained, “You can walk out of the clinic lighter. But someone else pays the price.”
