How To Meet A Mermaid for IDFA world premiere

Dutch filmmaker, Coco Schrijber, follows up her award-winning documentary, Bloody Sundays And Strawberry Pies, starring John Malkovich, Holland's Oscar entry in 2009, with her third feature-length film, How To Meet A Mermaid, slated for its world premiere in the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) Feature-length Competition.

In her trademark visually poetic style, Schrijber plunges deep into the concept of the sea, water as a source of life and death, turning it into a personal exploration and a meditation on the human will to live.

In HTMAM, the sea breaks its silence as it unveils the stories of Schrijber's brother Lex, a presumed suicide; Rebecca, who disappeared from a Disney cruise ship; and Miguel, for whom the Pacific Ocean carries a promise of freedom. These three protagonists, each with their own reasons to entrust their lives to the water, find refuge in the sea.

“I would prefer breathing to not breathing,” the American Nobel-prize winning author William Faulkner declared. Humanity, locked in its ceaseless struggles, appears to have two options: either to live, or not to live.  The perception of reality, which is constantly in flux, determines why Lex, Rebecca, and Miguel make drastic changes to their lives, seemingly motivated by hope or despair.

Trained as a visual artist, Schrijber is one of Holland’s leading, most adventurous documentary makers, having built an award-winning body of work that has been recognized in Holland and internationally. A graduate of Amsterdam’s art school, Rietveld Academy, in the audiovisual department, she worked as a first AD for films by reputed Dutch directors, Theo van Gogh, Pieter Kramer, Pieter Verhoef and Ben Sombogaart. Her debut film, In Motion (1996), premiered at IDFA and won the first prize in Rome. Her short documentary about children, Not Big, Not Small, won the pubcaster VPRO’s Golden Statue award in 1998.

Her first feature-length documentary, First Kill, was selected for the Joris Ivens Competition IDFA 2001 and won the Dutch press award at the Dutch Film Festival. Her short film, Beautiful World, was screened at festivals in Rome, Spain, Houston and New York, and won six international awards. Her second feature documentary, Bloody Mondays And Strawberry Pies, won the Dutch industry award Golden Calf for Best Feature Documentary and was the official Dutch entry for the Oscars in 2009. 

HTMAM was supported by The Netherlands Film Fund and Netherlands Film Fund Production Incentive, CoBO, Dutch Cultural Media Fund, The Flanders Audiovisual Fund and The Danish Film Institute and is a Zeppers Film production in co-production with VPRO & DR TV, Off World and House of Real.