Sirens Call
Showtimes
“I identify more hybrid. I am part human, I recognise that. But I’m not full.”
The world has changed a lot since back when Una last lived on this planet. There are deserts now where there used to be seas. In this lifetime she is a psychologist from Hawaii, but long ago she lived here as a mermaid. Now an autoimmune disease is drying up her body.
Una travels through postmodern America as if riding on waves. The shady back yards of diners, pyramids shining in the coloured lights of Vegas, and gleaming white hotel rooms introduce us to a fascinatingly strange and distant land. Una finds travel companions in a young tarot reader and the merfolk community, the members of which feel a connection with mythical water creatures. For them, it is a way of relating to the world around them and a way to challenge existing categories, to be themselves.
Sirens Call is a mystically beautiful road movie in which the highway runs somewhere between reality and fantasy. Having had its premiere in the Forum section of Berlinale, Miriam Gossing and Lina Sieckmann’s directorial debut finds a way to depict experiences that lay outside conventional understandings of reality in a hybrid of documentary, fiction, and sci-fi.
Christian Kochmann’s cinematographic work on 16 millimetre film looks fantastic. It leads the viewer to a timeless space where sirens sing to those who know how to listen.
Martta Tuppurainen (translated by Nooa Karlo)
