Hemel (video) — Danielle Dean

Danielle Dean

Hemel2024
29:44 min
16 mm transferred to digital video

Dean’s new film is a portrait of Hemel Hempstead, where she was raised and unfolds as a personal essay on the town’s history as a planned community under the New Towns Act of 1946. Titled Hemel, the work’s central reference is a 1957 sci-fi horror B-movie shot in town about the arrival of a non-human 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 brings together real and imagined worlds, both past and present. Hemel blurs fiction and documentary to expand a critical reading of the colonial overtones in the original movie, while recasting its visual language to consider the race, class, and labour dynamics of a small English town in the post-Brexit context.

Screening clip available on request. Full credits can be found in the film.

Producer: Luke W. Moody
Associate Producer: Caroline Smith
Cinematographer: Alberto Balázs
Focus Puller: Karl Hui
Cast: Danielle Dean as Quatermass, Audrey Dean, Dave Marchant as Barman, Brendon Laing, Brian Dean, Collum Dean, Chielota Aneto, Chibuikem Aneto, Clive Brooks as Man on Street, Harvey Taylor, band ‘Owes’, School pupil Godson Leboko, School pupil Sharon Brobbery, School pupil Jada Coke, School pupil David Owusu Ansah, Stanley Aneto, Theresa Ross as Lady with Handkerchief

Included in exhibition:
Out of This World, Mercer Union

Video still, Hemel