“Two Kiwi kids are looking for a fast trip out of mundane suburbia. They’ve cut the roof off an old valiant and are cruising the New Zealand highways, searching for adventure… They’re old enough to know what they’re doing – young enough to get it wrong.
“SNAKESKIN is an adjective more than a noun. It’s a state of mind,” says writer/ director Gillian Ashurst. “The film is essentially about taking risks. Our two heroes have grown up watching too much film and television and they’re expecting life to offer them those sorts of adventures.” “ “And it’s also about corruption,” says Ashurst, “about loss of innocence. On the surface everything seems so perfect in this place.. but underneath it’s a different story… There’s this famous New Zealand postcard – it’s a couple of spring lambs playing amongst the daffodils. Looks so beautiful. Except we forget where those lambs must inevitably end up. ‘SNAKESKIN’ is a journey to the flip side of that postcard.” “A seasoned traveller, Ashurst was inspired by “a lot of experiences that I’ve had and characters that I’ve met along the way, both here and abroad. And a love of road movies. I grew up in a similar environment to these kids and the sorts of things they do are exactly the sorts of things my friends and I did when we were growing up. We’d go off in on crazy journeys, waiting to see if things would happen - and sometimes they did.” - New Zealand Film Commission; www.nzfilm.co.nz/film/snakeskin; 30/01/2014,