Irina Bondas: I’d like to start with a question about the relationship between documentary and fiction in your film. Your film is a staged feature film, but at the same time this community really exists. What kind of community is this or what kind of movement is this?
Miri Ian Gossing: I think what is exciting about the film is that a relatively large part is documentary in nature – even if you can’t see that in our film afterwards due to the formal decisions we made. In general, in fact, we no longer believe in these genre divisions and we find it exciting to break boundaries and to raise these questions. At the start of the project, we were lucky to receive the Wim Wenders Stipend and could begin working on the film with two months of research. We had had a few places roughly in mind since finding out that there is a big merfolk subculture in the US. We met Una on this trip and visited a lot of locations throughout the US. I think you can still feel in the film that locations are often a starting point for our work as artists. In fact, there are no locations in our film which do not also exist outside the film, except for maybe the film set laboratory at the beginning. Even the ‘blue room’ is a tanning salon/wellness centre that really exists, even if it looks like it is from another planet.
Fabian Tietke: Do I understand correctly that you met the rest of the merfolk through Una?
Lina Sieckmann: Right. That added another dimension to the topic. Una and the merfolk pod are a group in Portland that we stuck to because we realised that although this whole cultural phenomenon and these places exist elsewhere, this special group simply had a lot more that interested us artistically.
MG: I was fascinated by the way that this group, in which everyone is so different, still belongs together and that they unite their different topics and strengths. At the same time, we quickly felt that they all have a deeper, ongoing connection to the mythological character of their ‘mersona’ and don’t view it as cosplay or dress-up. Each person has their own agency within the community. We found it especially exciting that, aside from performing together, they are also connected through activism. We were interested in these different dimensions, because we are also dealing with activism and post-human theory. And all at once you have these people and they simply ‘embody’ this. Of course, that is always more exciting than just thinking theoretically.
We conceive of cinema first from images and not a story. Our primary interest is: What can images actually generate together?
FT: To ask the most obvious question: SIRENS CALL is your first feature-length film. How was the transition?
LS: It was completely different than the short films. In our shorts, we didn’t work much with people – at least not visibly on-screen. There were the spaces, there was the staging, and there was the off-screen narration assembled from different sources. That was the delicate balance so that the films were often constructed as the memory of an unreliable narrator. Now, in SIRENS CALL, however, it was an entire group of ‘merfolk’. We spent quite a lot of time on location and built relationships over the six years that made the collective work on the film possible. Plus, a feature film of course also needs a certain dramatic form over two hours. That was rather new to us. What story do we want to tell? Do we even want to tell a story? Or do we want to shed light on a process, or different poles, during which something unfolds?
MG: At first, we felt a certain pressure. In the case of a feature film, there is the expectation that it needs to lead somewhere. But then I said to myself, no, we don’t want and don’t need to fulfil that expectation. We’ll keep thinking about it now as ten short films to take the pressure off and to open possibilities and find new forms ourselves. And this approach has slightly been maintained. There is a small remnant: The chapter structure through which we gave ourselves reminders and which guides us through the film. It was a relief to free ourselves from the dramatic rigour of narrative cinema. Formally, we tried a lot out: At some points, we had the confidence simply to enter a party situation with 18 people and then we would also stage a dialogue within classical standards. I think tons of aspects of our older work flows into this one too. There are a lot of very slow sequences with voice-over and pure setting. We both come from fine arts and have photography backgrounds, that’s why we conceive of cinema first visually and not as narrative. We’re interested in transcendental movies and slow cinema, but combined with moments of pop and a desire to break styles too. We ask ourselves: What can images actually generate together? How can we tell stories on a purely visual level?
IB: To come back again to the relationship between documentary and fiction: When I think about the protagonist’s road trip and the many rituals along the way, the questions comes up for me of how much of that is in fact scripted, invented by you two? How much of it is already there from the movement or the protagonist? So how did you work that out together, or did you not?
MG: We are specifically interested in the relationship between finding and inventing, documentary and fiction. For me, there are three characters in the film: Gina as a human, her ‘mersona’ Una, and the fictional siren character that we added, the one who goes on the trip. The starting point was documentary and it kept developing towards fiction, with our discussions with Una playing a big role there. Interestingly, the film would sometimes refer to her real life. At some point, I said to her: ‘Sometimes you talk as though you were an Atlantic oracle. Maybe we’ll do an oracle scene about the future of the earth. What do you think?’ And she said: ‘Yeah, during the pandemic, I started giving oracle readings.’ So there were moments when life and the film intermeshed, also because it was ultimately an eight year process that we went through together. In this period, we spent multiple months in Portland each year. The actual filming was, however, a slow process, also because we shot a lot on 16mm.
In fact, both of us are very theoretical people and start with a lot of concepts and thoughts in the back of our minds. But when we shoot, we try to let go of that and search intuitively.
LS: In earlier works, we also dealt with the relationship between authenticity and fiction and it was exciting to meet Gina/Una of all people, because she is also, in principle, a kind of performance artist. So the topic of staging is already part of her character. When we met her for the first time in Portland in 2017, she said to us: ‘That’s when I’m in costume’, meaning the human outfit which she also wears in everyday life for her job as a prison psychologist. We simply found this self-image that she lives out – being something other than a human – very interesting. It was clear that the point was not to psychologise, but instead to follow this self-assertiveness, engage with it.
MG: In fact, both of us are very theoretical people and start with a lot of concepts and thoughts in the back of our minds. But when we shoot, we try to let go of that and search intuitively. To find an emotional entry point, to be present. That’s why we enjoy ourselves conceptually in the edit and try again to find a new structure in all the footage. In the case of this film, that was very challenging. We had 72 hours of footage and we edited for 18 months to tease out the inherent structure so that the film doesn’t completely fall apart and, at the same time, still has a meandering movement.
FT: Can you say a bit more about the process of working a structure out of the footage? Were there in-between steps?
MG: In the beginning, there was a moment of collecting and opening up to this viewpoint on the world. In general, in our films we are often interested in what comes out of an individual’s fate and connects us all, where it is maybe also about a metaphor, an image for something, or a deeper, universal topic. The first year, we were just very open, in the second we already had a clearer idea what might still happen, and in the third we considered what we had already shot and what we could still add. As a final step, we looked at all the footage in the edit suite and built associative paths from one moment to the next. An approximate vision of where it should go was of course implicit from the get-go. A play between control and letting go.
LS: The film is based on a delicate balance between authenticity, documentary film, and fiction. A pure documentary wouldn’t have been enough for us, pure fiction too. For a while, the share of fiction – because we were initially busy with teasing out a kind of dramatic structure – was relatively high. But it was clear to us from the start that the film clearly needed the documentary source and antipode and we wanted to position ourselves too. Right at the beginning, you see the scene in the laboratory setting, that is, the film as experimental set-up, we thought that was a good way to reveal that we think of whole thing more as a questioning and experimental set-up and that between the person asking and the person answering, there is also a particular relationship which developed over time.
It’s more of a felt, situational, associative…maybe also an intuitive truth which we followed.
MG: And what do we want from these categories anyway? Fiction and reality and documentary and fiction film? How do they work and what means do they actually use? And also maybe to deconstruct this or look at it with a queer gaze – we didn’t want to choose a dramatic form that works with the classic, ecstatic climax, but instead also take hybridity seriously in the form. We thought about how we can construct a film that also moves in waves and again and again chooses another perspective on the same topic. With a protagonist who more or less crosses four different genres. It starts as a sci-fi movie, it turns into a road movie, then it turns into a documentation of a subculture, and at the end it could almost be described as a melodrama. There is this Japanese dramatic structure, ‘kishōtenketsu’, which we also know from Studio Ghibli films, for example, where the storytelling has no necessity and no causality, that is, that one thing must follow the other and each path must be explained, but instead it’s more of a felt, situational, associative…maybe also an intuitive truth that we followed.
IB: Why these four genres specifically? Is that something that was specified for you through the development or was it also something that you wanted to bring in from the start?
MG: It’s always both. We think very clearly beforehand about what the structure could be which we would find exciting. If we can reach it is another question. You have to consider that we mainly shot everything with four to six people. So there’s no massive lighting crew, there’s no 30 person set. We were in all the locations with this small crew, lived together and shot for over six months. It was made with a super low budget, which means a lot of things are due to the moment and that we had to work in a very free or experimental manner.
The entire topic of course contains the wish to be something else, to fit in somewhere, to push against boundaries.
LS: There are still a few ‘off’ moments in a lot of spots. I really noticed them again myself when we worked on those spots with the sound designer. There is often a moment of self-irony and humour there. The entire topic of course contains the wish to be something else, to fit in somewhere, to push against boundaries. I think it is always in a way the assertiveness of form or genre that appeals to us, too, and then it’s not quite realised. And quoting sci-fi or the alien metaphor simply presented itself to us.
MG: We also found it exciting how you can’t escape it. We find genres exciting, precisely in relation to American society, because we realised that emotional reality and memory here are often already somehow fictionalised. People there sometimes talk in a particular manner and the way they say things often reminds me of a movie and how a movie wants to trigger a certain feeling. The memory of movies talks there, in their stories and memories. We grew up in a small town in Germany and were very strongly socialised on American films because we were 90s TV kids. And of course this is also part of our unconscious and has an influence.
FT: I’d like to jump in here. You’ve said a lot about the people, and rightly so, but what I also find really great in the film are, for example, the interiors. How much set design was there?
MG: None of the costumes or locations are staged, but as they were found.
LS: The apartment is also Una’s real apartment. That was also a huge stroke of luck for us, just like the costumes and hair. We didn’t have to worry about any of it. MG: The house she lives in is on Hayden Island. It’s a rather rough part of Portland, outside the city.
IB: In the middle of your film is this long merfolk sequence, which is set apart from the rest of the film and in which this community and every single person is celebrated and shines. During this sequence, I really had to think about concepts like post-humanism and different authors like Octavia Butler, Le Guin, and Donna Haraway. For you two, is there a kind of utopian idea to be found in this community? A future society in this apocalyptic, post-apocalyptic world?
So that we don’t always stay solely in a critical mode, but also try to ask ourselves questions about elective families, positive and negative ideas about society, how we can think, live, love, whatever differently.
MG: Actually, I would put it just like that. I would say it’s a search for it. Our film asks the question of how we – individually or collectively – want to live, but also how we can still live at all in the world’s ecological and political situation. The film poses very existential and painful topics too. We tried to reproduce the society and times in which we live through an almost constant stream of media input, which infiltrates all of Una’s attempts to ‘feel safe.’ In reality, it’s always running parallel to life and colliding with it. I find this ambivalent gaze very, very important so that we don’t always stay solely in a critical mode, but also try to ask ourselves questions about elective families, positive and negative ideas about society, how we can think, live, love, whatever differently.
LS: For many, it’s also an emancipatory moment. There’s growing social inequality, real conditions are a major strain for a lot of our friends and acquaintances in the US – anyone without a net won’t be saved by society. We’ve heard about this for a long time and we also have the feeling that it is getting worse and worse. That was also something about Una that fascinated us: The idea and necessity of community building is much stronger there, that’s part of it and it has a notion that is deeply emancipatory and involves solidarity, and which really impressed us.
IB: Above all, when you think about how you began working on the film in 2017, during the term of the former US president who will soon be president again…
MG: Those are all things that got inscribed, including the extreme time around the election in the US in 2020 and 2024. This time can be seen in the film in the documentary footage of the protests. Now that the film is done, I keep thinking about collective, political traumas as moments of ‘alienation’, meaning how does a person actually feel in a traumatised body and how does an oppressive society inscribe itself in our bodies? Topics like immunity and dealing with illness. Why do we as a society have this fascination for myths, mythical creatures, for aliens and mermaids? How the merfolk are always changing their shape and despite repression and the most difficult life circumstances somehow stay fluid, activist, lively, and playful is also very strong proof for me of the utopian potential of queerness and being trans in the world. I find that very touching and empowering.
IB: That means we can soon learn a lot from them or, in fact, have already learned a lot.
MG: Yeah, now already too. I have the feeling that we will in any case be dealing for a long time with many of the topics the merfolk talk about. In this sense: Staying with the trouble!
