Mermaids and Sirens: On the Proliferation of Mermaids in Times of Shipwreck

Over the past decade, numerous mermaid schools have opened in the United States, Australia and Asia, teaching people how to turn into merfolk. Could merpeople today announce the collapse of capitalism as they heralded the shipwrecks of the past? Oscillating between an interview with a professional mermaid and merpeople tutorials that reinvent the chimera, Suzanne Husky’s film revisits the event of the shipwreck and the figure of the mermaid as fantasies of the failure of the commercial world, transformed into popular culture.