No Shoes Inside

2024 | Duration: 03:52

This is Sean Dendere’s Short Film Directorial Debut. “No Shoes Inside” was created during an artistic residency at Metal Cutlure – read more.

“You come home and dust off your shoes, right? Or at least that’s what the world thinks you may or should do. Well, that’s not quite the premise of Sean Dendere’s No Shoes Inside. Rather, it’s a semi-autobiographical exploration of how he, and how he has observed others, interact with ideas of home, including through ancestral memory and routine becoming interchangeable with rituals. The short film explores the colourful yet complex nuances of the different places - and potentially, things and people - we have learned to attach the home label. As a second-generation British-Zimbabwean raised in Peterborough, journeying through life with a wisdom derived from foreignness and pieces and artefacts of home laid bare beside settees and in entryways, these are the gems that signal home - but as the lines and lives blur, which one becomes more representative of home? It’s this questioning that provoked the multihyphenate to unravel what home has come to mean to him; the shared love for flavoursome aromas, ritualistic movements and whispers from the mother tongue, Dendere’s story is, and can only be, multifarious. In doing so, he offers comfort to those who have experienced displacement, domestic struggles or the loss of loved ones, leading to a compromised sense of home which echoes through generations.” – Aswan Magumbe

First premiered ‘No Shoes Inside’ at EartH Hackney and participated in a panel conversation alongside the filmmakers Bafic & Penny Woolcock, moderated by Blu Smith for the Central Saint Martins Creative Unions Symposium in 2024. See here.

Special thanks to Metal Culture, Blu Smith & Tawanda Mhindurwa

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