Hemel

A portrait of Hemel Hempstead, the English town where director Danielle Dean was raised, unfolds as a personal essay on the town’s history. The work’s central reference is a 1957 sci-fi/horror B movie shot in town about the arrival of a nonhuman entity that infiltrates the minds of residents and endangers life with a toxic black slime. Playing a composite character based on herself and the movie’s detective protagonist, Dean offers a critical reading of the film’s colonial overtones, while recasting its visual language to consider the race, class, and labour dynamics of a small English town in the post-Brexit context.