STORY

Drawn by the sounds of a sinking vessel carrying refugees in a storm, Syrena, a woman from the sea, rescues a drowning woman and they wash up on the shore of an unnamed coast. The survivors are immediately detained and imprisoned in a women’s refugee center. As other detainees are attracted and repulsed by Syrena and her mysterious nature, the power of her presence and her song slowly infiltrate the center, and the urge for escape builds. This surreal psychological drama is a love story for a divided world — a testament to people’s uncanny ability to connect — across life experiences, languages, and cultures.

DOCUMENTATION

Though we’re not the first to pursue ethical fictional storytelling, we are looking to ground our values in action — to codify a process for collaboration across disciplines and build innovative structures for intentional profit sharing with participants. We are documenting our process from its earliest stage of conception through distribution because we hope that being transparent about the road blocks we encounter and the tough but necessary discussions we have to make may prove useful to others looking for an alternate model.

The resulting documentary will be used throughout the varying stages of production to raise awareness and support for SYRENA and uplift the stories of the organizations and individuals who lend their expertise.

METHODOLOGY

Even though our film contains magical elements, we aspire to create a nuanced and accurate representation of a refugee detention center that honors the lived experiences of people who take the arduous journey to seek a better life. We are deploying a documentary approach of investigation and community connection in service of ethical fictional storytelling, to create a high-concept, high-quality and market-viable film.

Our goal is to have conversations with women and children from a variety of backgrounds and nationalities who have sought asylum to inform the story, and to build partnerships with refugee businesses, service organizations, and experts to ensure ethical fictional storytelling to direct attention towards these organizations' work and share our resources.

VISION

SYRENA is an experiment in interbeing — in process, aesthetic, and impact. We aspire to democratize the process, explore new modes for collaborative story creation, and meaningfully engage with the communities whose stories we are uplifting.

We want to bring the devising methodology more common in theater to film creation. We will empower every member of the artistic collective and community partnership to serve as a generative creator who is credited and compensated for their shared authorship.

“Stories are compasses and architecture; we navigate by them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice. To love someone is to put yourself in their place, we say, which is to put yourself in their story, or figure out how to tell yourself their story. Which means that a place is a story, and stories are geography, and empathy is first of all an act of imagination, a storyteller's art, and then a way of traveling from here to there.”

Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby