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Director's Company: Mermaid LegendDirector: Toshiharu Ikeda, 1984, Japan, Japanese with English subtitles, 109 mins, Cert: 18
Wed 8 January 2025 // 19:30
Tickets: £5
Elemental and mythic, Mermaid Legend exudes a lyrical melancholia for the dying way of life of seafaring fishermen and ama divers. Set in a coastal fishing hamlet, Toshiharu Ikeda’s eco thriller finds the incursive grasp of industrialization and corporate greed encroaching on natural realms. Migiwa (Mari Shirato), an ama diver who plunges the azure depths for abalone in the heat of summer, becomes entangled in a redevelopment scheme involving powerful local figures and yakuza when her husband is killed for witnessing a murder. Battered and left for dead, the pearl diver plans her vengeance on those who wronged her to devastating effect. Incurring a siren’s sanguinary wrath—one which can only be described as a sheer force of nature—the elegiac Mermaid Legend is a brooding requiem for loss, a cautionary parable for man’s true acquiescence to the natural world.
Screening 40 years after it was completed, this is a rare exploitation cult movie that before 2024 had never played any film festival outside of its native Japan or ever released in any format internationally. From the late Toshiharu Ikeda, director of Evil Dead Trap (1988,) comes a tale of powerful vengeance.
Content warning: sexual violence See BBFC advice
Doors open 7pm, film starts 7.30pm
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Dove Street South, BS2 8JD Bristol, United Kingdom, Bristol, United Kingdom
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