Sea Angels
Director: Cissi Efraimsson
Sweden, United States, 2024, 9 min
Shooting Format:Digital
Festival Year:2025
Category:Animation
Genres:Comedy, Stopmotion, Mockumentary
Cast:Klara Söderberg
Crew:Writer: Cissi Efraimsson. Producer: Saga Gärde.
Email:cissiefraimsson@gmail.com
Synopsis
The polluted ocean forced mermaids to reveal their existence as non- mythological creatures and seek help on land. We follow their daily life in a pool named Sea Angels, a Sea World-like theme park for humans. Sea Angels is a stop motion animation mockumentary by Swedish artist Cissi Efraimsson.
Trailer
About the director
Cissi Efraimsson is a Swedish artist and director working in the fields of stop motion animation, sculpture, painting and music.
Efraimsson graduated from the MFA program in Experimental Animation at the California Institute of the Arts in 2022. She earned a BFA in Fine Arts from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm in 2018.
Efraimsson works at the borderline between reality and the surreal/supernatural. She often uses a dream, myth, or creature, placing them in the real world, within a contemporary context inspired by popular culture. Efraimsson is always applying a feminist point of view, and works on the border between the ordered and near-perfect and the skewed and absurd. The atmosphere she creates is often a balance between the ugly and beautiful, and Efraimsson mines events and dialog from her own life – with a certain degree of twisting and turning. Recurring themes include fantasy, escapism, magic, and the subconscious, while humor and a playful energy course throughout everything she creates. In addition, Efraimsson’s musical output is vast. She currently sings and drums in the punk-pop trio Vulkano, and has previously drummed in Those Dancing Days.
Filmmaker's note
I wanted to find an entertaining way to talk about pollution, exploitation of minorities and sexism. By using humor as a tool, I hope to reach a wider audience with the message. Get the viewer to think about their own behaviors and open up to self-reflection. In this way, create some sort of awareness around these topics and hopefully also make us want to change our behaviors.
There’s a beautiful, old pool built 1904 in Stockholm called Centralbadet that inspired this film. I had a student card there and liked going there after a long day in art school. Mythological creatures are a reacurring theme in my art practice so lying in the pool I started fantasizing about mermaids living there and different scenarios how they got there and the story started to take shape. I had been working with environment since I spent a month up at the nature science station in the northernmost of Sweden (Abisko). I stayed at the station with the researchers and got to follow their daily work. There were many eye-opening conversations and workshops. This inspired me to make a film about ocean pollution.
When I moved to the US I decided to change the location for the film. The old pool in Stockholm was changed to the LA84 Foundation/John C. Argue Swim Stadium in LA (the old pool from the 1984 Summer Olympics) and the Baltic Sea became the Pacific Ocean.