VIDEO EXCLUSIVE: Jasmine Curtis-Smith & Director Kenneth Dagaton On ‘In My Mother’s Skin’

In My Mother’s Skin follows the story of a rich Filipino family in 1945 who fears the nearby Japanese soldiers and what they might do to get the family’s riches. While the father, Aldo, leaves the family behind to search for help, the mother becomes deadly sick. In search of help, the youngest daughter, Tala, decides to trust the flesh-eating fairy (Jasmine Curtis-Smith) who wishes to eat the whole family.

In an exclusive interview with uInterview founder Erik Meers at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, Curtis-Smith sat down to discuss what drew her to the story.

“First of all, I definitely love horror films,” Curtis-Smith began. “I have made a few in the past and I’ve always been excited, like seeing how doing it on set and how it translates to the bigger screen especially when the audience finally watches it complete with the sound effects and you know all the different like slow takes that eventually just creeps up on you. I love that. That’s number one, but number two was really the script by Kenneth, it was just so lively and the fact that it was set in the ’40s and the fairy in itself was such a character that felt surreal but at the same time real enough because of what we were all going through in the pandemic so I just thought it would be interesting to play something that wasn’t human and find a way to incorporate those pieces like the pandemic, the fear, and the claustrophobia through her and through that entity.”

Curtis-Smith and writer and director Kenneth Dagatan two also talked about the hardest parts of filming.

“Yeah, I think I’ve got it easy as the actress in the film because I mean, the hard part, so to speak, in for my character would be wearing the layers of costume because it’s a bit heavy but honestly like the whole journey for me was really easy,” Curtis-Smith continued. “I didn’t feel any difficulties. If there were any, they really did not make me feel it or not let us know or make us feel bothered by that so, to be honest, I had no difficulty. I mean if anything it’s like just making sure that I could deliver precisely what Kenneth was looking for in the fairy and being consistent with that, especially the modulation of the voice. I wanted to be consistent with that because you could easily forget tomorrow what the tone you used yesterday was or how low and how freaky you were or slow or you know that was something we would watch out for all the time.”

“For me I mean, making it is hard enough already and even writing is hard enough already but in production everything’s compromised, but I’m so happy,” Dagatan said. “I was trying to play around with the idea of making the film, during the production, making the film simple because of the compromises and I didn’t want to delete some scenes just because of we don’t have time, if we cut scenes, let’s make it intentional and I think that’s the hardest part for me because you’re killing your darlings already and I think that’s the fun part of filmmaking. You start to create something new, create something you didn’t think of before and it’s really amazing for me to discover these ideas with the people I work with which I love.”

In My Mother’s Skin will soon be available for streaming on Amazon Prime Video.