“Titanic Ocean”, Interview with director Konstantina Kotzamani

Screening in the Un Certain Regard section of the 79th Cannes Film Festival, “Titanic Ocean” is the new feature by Greek director Konstantina Kotzamani. Set in a Japanese boarding school where teenage girls train to become professional mermaids, performing in aquariums and becoming stars under silicon tails and invented names, the film follows 17-year-old Akame as she learns to hold her breath, discovers first love and undergoes a transformation that goes far beyond performance. What sounds like pure invention is rooted in reality: the schools exist, the trend is massive across Asia, and Kotzamani spent ten years turning this world into a film that weaves together questions of identity, beauty standards, eating disorders and abuse without ever settling into judgement. The result is  a coming-of-age story told through the mythology of sirens.

A photo that started everything

The project began a decade ago with an article and a photograph: five Japanese girls wearing silicon mermaid tails during a training class. Konstantina Kotzamani was immediately captivated, and as she researched further she discovered an entire universe: girls who train to become mermaids, choose new names, new colors, new personas, and build careers as performers. What drew her in was not the spectacle but the psychological dimension beneath it. “These girls are really creating another identity where they feel much safer. They choose another name, they choose colours, they choose another character, they magnify their body and it’s as if they’re living a parallel virtual reality for who they are”. She wanted the film to explore that fantasy without condemning it.

A generation trapped between freedom and fear

For Konstantina Kotzamani, the mermaid school is a magnifying glass on something much broader: the condition of contemporary adolescence. The moment of leaving home, she says, can feel like pure freedom but also like hostility, depending on how much confidence you have been given. She recognizes the feeling in her own past, but sees it amplified in today’s young people. “Nowadays young people are even more trapped into this feeling that everything seems unsettling and the world seems dangerous, so people are trapped and a bit more introvert even if they show that they are extrovert”. Social media has doubled the phenomenon, the construction of a public self that bears little relation to the private one is no longer a metaphor. It is daily life.

The Greek myth at the heart of it all

The sirens of Greek mythology, creatures whose haunting voice lures men into the abyss, gave Konstantina Kotzamani the key to her protagonist’s arc. Akame begins the film unable to speak loudly, unable to voice her needs, her love, her friendships. The entire journey becomes a search for that voice. “I felt that searching for your inner voice could be so powerful. Finding a voice as a girl today, it’s a very nice metaphor. This is what we try to do now: to speak for ourselves and speak loud and have somebody listen to us”.

Filming in Japan as a woman director

Setting the film in Japan was the obvious choice, but it came with enormous challenges. It took ten years to finance the project, and Japan’s film industry is not easily open to international co-productions. Once on set, Konstantina Kotzamani had to navigate a culture built on rigid hierarchies where women, she says, are almost always at the lowest part of the scale. “It’s almost unbelievable for a woman to have power in Japan. I had to question many ways myself and how I can exist and persist and insist on what I want as a vision there”. The connection with her lead actress, however, was immediate: a chemistry built on the young performer’s willingness to let go.

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