Skin

A troubled teen embraces a dangerous subculture of hate in this hard-hitting Dutch drama about the allure of extremist ideology. Seventeen-year-old Frankie Epstein (a sympathetic Robert de Hoog) lives adrift in a working-class neighborhood, listening to punk music and getting high with best friend Jeffrey (Juliann Ubbergen). His father (John Buijsman), deeply traumatized by the Holocaust, is emotionally detached and preoccupied with the family laundry business. When his mother (Sylvia Poortia) is diagnosed with cancer, Frankie becomes distraught and joins a gang of neo-Nazi skinheads. A growing taste for violence leads to a confrontation with the law, forcing father and son to face open wounds. <strong>SKIN</strong> is based on a high-profile 1983 stabbing of a black youth in the Netherlands, the first deadly hate crime in that nation since World War II.