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Audrey De Haan

AUDREY DE HAAN
The Fence
5:43
Film
Not for Sale

Aliens and monsters are a recurring theme in my life. It’s partly because the stories I like are full of them, but also because I often feel slightly out of place in society—somewhat like an alien pretending to be human. Sometimes it’s a positive thing, and those around me enjoy my strangeness. Other times it’s a negative thing, and I feel cut off from my community. It’s this experience that draws my attention when I hear stories of alienation.

I’ve begun to see this theme in some of the greatest failures of humanity. The social issues I think about most—Israel/Palestine, our prison system, and our southern border— are fundamentally connected: they’re instances of communities drawing lines in the sand and saying we are human, and you are not; instances of humans labelling other humans as monsters and treating them that way.

As a result, I’m sensitive to the way aliens, monsters, and societal others are handled in fiction. In some stories, they’re purely evil, and the fear felt by the main characters towards the other is justified. But there’s also a different story, which is what my film explores: the monster turns out to be hardly monstrous at all. In these more radical, anarchic stories, the main characters learn that the lines drawn by their societies to divide the humans from the monsters—the good from the evil—were fiction all along.  

It’s an old story, but one that I believe needs retelling, so that the bones become visible and we can recognize ourselves—both in the society behind the wall, and the alien monster on the other side—and maybe, if we’re brave, in the one who crosses the divide.

-Audrey De Haan

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