A film women can enter like clear water: at its centre is Gina Rønning, a psychologist from Portland, Oregon, whose »mersona« – Una the Mermaid – guides, or rather swims through the film. Una searches for kindred spirits and finds them in the genuinely thriving merfolk subculture. The filmmakers stage Una’s story within the architecture of American consumer spaces – malls, theme parks, a water theatre in Florida – spaces whose »uncanny« quality Jean Baudrillard famously theorised in his concept of the simulacrum: what is real, what is illusion? From this, the film draws a further question: what is documentary, what is fiction? The combination of grainy 16 mm film and shimmering scale costume produces an extraordinary viewing experience, one that seems to unfold in a metaphysical world both narratively and visually.
Since antiquity, the attributes of the mermaid have expressed what Klaus Theweleit calls the »fear of bodily dissolution«: water, voice, hybrid bodies. The mermaid embodies the alien – and therefore carries danger. In Homer, Odysseus narrowly escapes the fatal song of the sirens; a myth that lives on to this day in the Rhineland’s Loreley. The filmmakers have succeeded in appropriating and reversing this patriarchal-tragic narrative of the mermaid, turning it into an expression of the alienation endemic to today’s world. Transformed from a deterrent symbol of death, the mermaid becomes a collective emblem for all those who seek community within the isolating structures of capitalist society.

Guests: Miri Ian Gossing, Lina Sieckmann, Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens

In cooperation with dfi – Dokumentarfilminitiative im Filmbüro NW