Yo, Sirena (I, Mermaid)
2021 · 9m · España
Directed by Augusto Almoguera
Genres: drama, fantasy, LGBTQ+
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, mythic
Sirena is finally the woman she always wanted to be, but a romantic disappointment makes old ghosts and insecurities resurface in her; to defeat them she will have to immerse herself in her deepest fears in order to resurface again, in a reimagining of 'The Little Mermaid' from the point of view of a transsexual girl.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects a trans retelling of Little Mermaid to genuflect toward inspiration-porn uplift, so it's genuinely disarming that Almoguera lets Sirena sit in actual psychological wreckage—old dysphoria, romantic failure, the whole mess—without redeeming it into a neat metaphor.
The film positions itself thoughtfully within the lineage of fairy tale deconstruction and queer retellings, but it's the deliberate visual grammar—the submerged sequences, the color palette's shift from surface to depth—that situates it as formally aware of how myth functions as internal landscape rather than external adventure.
The whole film hinges on the decision to make the underwater sequences not triumphant or magical, but claustrophobic and introspective—that inversion of the mermaid fantasy from liberation to confrontation is what transforms a premise into something that actually *works*.