In his raw and visceral short film Skin on Skin, Simon Schneckenburger, a graduate in Fiction Directing from the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg, explores the lives of two men – one a worker, the other a security guard – employed at a slaughterhouse. Amidst rampant exploitation and oppression, the two try to find a space for love.

Having already won numerous plaudits – including the Grand Prix at the Brussels Short Film Festival and an Audience Award at Vienna Shorts, as well as picking up a nomination for a German Short Film Award – the work will now unspool as part of the 59th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival under the banner of EFP’s Future Frames.

Cineuropa: What were the kinds of things that influenced the origin of the film?
Simon Schneckenburger: Everything started with the slaughterhouse itself. I’ve always been deeply interested in places, and in how people and places shape each other. How do people form a place? And how does a place transform those who use it?

A slaughterhouse is an extreme place: loud, harsh, toxic and violent. Yet at the same time, a kind of intimacy emerges. People work closely side by side, physically, often wordlessly, almost instinctively. They endure the space together. I found it exciting to see how a place usually associated with violence and the trivialisation of death could also become a space for human connection.

When I first entered a slaughterhouse, I was confronted with how much it revolves around bodies: living, dead, wet bodies, body parts. There is constant physical contact but no real connection. And that’s exactly where my film begins: with the longing for real touch – not just physical, but also emotional. There’s a desire to truly feel someone and to be felt in return – to feel something in a place designed to make you numb. Skin eventually became a central motif. It is both a boundary and a point of contact, between inside and outside, between protection and sensation.

What about the decision to shoot on film?
Nico Schrenk, my cinematographer, and I wanted to create a visual world that would feel raw and unpolished, yet still alive. Hence, the decision to shoot on 16 mm film was very clear to us. The grain, the colours, the organic texture of the material… It gave us exactly the feeling we were looking for. A tactile material for a physical world. The look wasn’t meant to smooth things out, beautify them or aestheticise them in a calculated way.

At our film school, we no longer learn how to shoot on film. I’m convinced that this is a mistake and a rather naïve attitude. If you really want to understand the medium, you should also know what it feels like to work with actual film stock. 16 mm forces you to reduce, and in that reduction, I find a kind of creative freedom. You have to plan more carefully, trust your instincts and make clear decisions. I believe that limitations are good for art, as they help you focus on what really matters and get to the core of a story.

Was it a tough shoot?
Yes, the shoot was challenging both physically and emotionally. We filmed in a former slaughterhouse that had been shut down following an animal welfare scandal. Even though the rooms were mostly empty and had to be brought back to life by our art department, the place still carried a strong presence, a heaviness, a lingering sense of death that you simply couldn’t ignore. You could feel it, and most of all, you could smell it. That intense, sweet, acrid odour was deeply embedded in the building. With each shooting day, it became more oppressive.

How did you cast the lead, Jonas Smulders?
I’ve been following Jonas’s work since the early short films by Mees Peijnenburg. Seeing him in those works had a big influence on how I approach storytelling because it was the first time I truly understood how few words are needed when you’re working with actors like Jonas. He has this incredible transparency and presence that allows so much to be felt. So, working with him had always been a desire of mine. When I developed Skin on Skin, I very naively wrote the role of Jakob specifically for him. I just sent him the script and hoped he might read it. And he did. We spoke, and I think he was also drawn to the physical intensity of the role.

What projects are you working on next?
I’m working on my debut feature. It portrays a friendship between two young men who play in a post-rock band and dream of leaving their small village behind to make it big. But one of them lives with bipolar disorder, and their friendship begins to unravel, slowly burning away with each new manic and depressive episode. It will be another physically intense film. At the same time, I’m also exploring the idea of expanding Skin on Skin into something longer.