One day a simple fisherman, trawling off the Irish coast, catches a beautiful and mysterious woman in his nets. She appears to be dead but, miraculously, comes back to life before his eyes. So begins Neil Jordan’s deeply enchanting fairytale: Ondine effortlessly mixes myth and fantasy with the life of a fishing community on the jagged seascapes of the wild southwest. The fisherman, Syracuse (Colin Farrell), is an irresponsible loner, separated from his wife and distanced from Annie (Alison Barry), his wheelchair-bound daughter. But everyone’s drab and ordinary life is about to change with the arrival of the ethereal Ondine (Alicja Bachleda), the woman from the sea, who may or may not be real. The world-weary Syracuse soon finds himself believing that the stranger may well be a myth come true, a woman sent to change his life and a powerful force for love and hope. A welcome homecoming for Jordan, Ondine works as a beautifully wrought fable, a romantic re-imagining of the dreary lives of working people, lifted out of their daily routines by an exquisite, unfathomable stranger who suddenly appears in their midst. Piers Handling, Toronto International Film Festival Programme

Director’s Statement:

During the Writer’s Strike a Hollywood project fell through… I went back to Ireland, where I have a house in West Cork and wrote this fairy tale, which could be shot entirely within a radius of five miles from where I live. About a fisherman, who pulled up a living girl in his net. His disabled daughter, who invented stories about her. These stories feed on local legends – sea creatures, seal creatures, selkies. How they only have a certain time on land. How they fall in love with their rescuer. How they can make a wish come true. How the sea always calls them back. Much of what the girl invents turns out to be true, but never in ways she expected. The whole thing develops into an impossibly romantic love story, in which real human beings insist on turning their lives into a fairy tale. Because reality is too hard, maybe. Because that is what we love to do.