Isa Hesse-Rabinovitch | Sirenen-Eiland

Who Listens to the Siren’s Song? On Isa Hesse-Rabinovitch’s Sirenen-Eiland and its echoes at the Locarno Film Festival 2026 

Isa Hesse-Rabinovitch (1917-2003) began making films when she was 52. She was already an established artist at this point, having made her career as an illustrator, photographer and graphic artist. The result is a filmmaker that is already fully formed when she makes her first film. In fact, all of her films are works made by an artist who has already developed a language of their own eager to expand this language through the experimental possibilities of cinema (first analogue, at the age of 52; and video, at the age of 67): including poetic voiceover narration, photo-roman storytelling (as in Chris Marker’s 1962 La Jetée) intertwined with staged scenes and documentary material, beautifully photographic juxtapositions and double exposures, and an incredible, masterfully accomplished sound edit that mixes voices in multiple languages, diegetic music, and fragments of sounds recorded by Hesse-Rabinovitch herself in different places around the world.

Her films are both intimate and mythological, dedicated to telling stories about women and in doing so connect women across shared dreams, desires, fears, and disappointments, from the contemporary experience all the way back through the ages. No matter what language is spoken, be it German, English, French or Italian, the words and rhythm of speech convey a poetry that, in Hesse-Rabinovitch’s films, feel vital to the woman’s experience. In cinema, but also through the medium’s overlapping aesthetic and narrative qualities with photography and sound, Hesse finds a cinematic language that, while reminiscent of other avant-garde and experimental creators of her time, feels so particularly her own. 

This year at the Locarno Film Festival, the Cinémathèque suisse presented two key works, Sirenen-Eiland (1981) and Geister und Gäste (1989), as well as a thoughtfully-titled panel “Reaching Out to Isa Hesse-Rabinovitch”, with Fabienne Liptay (University of Zurich), Burcu Dogramaci (Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich) and Seraina Winzeler (Cinémathèque suisse), as co-editors of a publication on Isa Hesse-Rabinovitch, and Marcel Henry (Museo Hermann Hesse Montagnola), Anka Schmid (film director), Rahel Jung (editor of the feminist film magazine Totale). The “reaching out” was of an intergenerational nature, from people like Schmid, who actually met Isa Hesse-Rabinovitch and was inspired by her work (enough to make a documentary about her in 2009, Das Grosse Spiel), to Liptay who discovers Hesse-Rabinovitch’s work as a scholar at the Zurich Central Library, and Jung who, as the youngest member on the panel, approaches her work from the vantage of today. 

One of the films screened at Locarno is the new restoration of Sirenen-Eiland (1981), an absolute gift to experimental world cinema. Unlike this year’s multi-million-dollar film adaptation by Christopher Nolan, Hesse-Rabinovitch’s retelling of The Odyssey is almost entirely devoid of men, focusing instead on the siren figure, reinterpreted for the modern age. The “Eiland” in question is a fictional amalgam between the island of Manhattan and the underground catacombs of Paris; the water from the rivers and the sewers run through the pipes and below the city as a constant aural reminder of a liquid modernity. In this aquatic backdrop, the sirens come out at night, singing on rooftops and in darkly lit bars, singing alone but not for this reason without conviction. Amongst the three cinematographers who worked on the film is none other than Babette Mangolte, the cinematographer of Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975). 

Sirenen-Eiland has thematically and aesthetically resonated through other films in the programme. This series of echoes include Beatrice Gibson’s At Night, a 16mm film shot in dark Parisian streets in peripheral neighbourhoods typically excluded from French cinema, where the darkness provides a safe and intimate pretext for women to speak to one another, share their experience of childbirth, motherhood, sex and desire, privilege and working-class realities, as the camera focuses on the women listening, learning from each other, and practicing an empathy rarely seen on the screen; or Albert Serra’s Seize moments de ma vie, with Ingrid Caven, as she sings her heart out, like a siren from Hesse-Rabinovitch’s film, telling her story of war, tragedy, love, and loss to those will listen. Together, these films suggest that one of the most radical things today is to listen to women. 

In Sirenen-Eiland, the siren’s song must be heard. Hesse-Rabinovitch’s film suggests that while men are busy elsewhere at war, women are alone singing in the ruins of ghost towns, waiting for an opportunity for love and connection. The siren’s song is not dangerous, unless what it threatens is the very architecture of destruction and desolation on which society is built. In this way, the film also resonates with another film in the festival this year, Ana Vaz’s Hanabi, a film structured around Yoko Hayasuke’s Journal of a Radioactive Brain, a diary which captures a young woman’s anxiety and fear following the devastating earthquake and nuclear disaster in Japan in 2011. Vaz’s film proposes that listening to women is the only way that our planet will survive the destruction and contamination created by men. For Vaz, the siren not only sings; she cries, she screams, she writes. Her film calls to embrace a feminist cry of fear and pain, one that when isolated borders on a kind of neurosis, but when expressed collectively (and/or creatively, as in a book or a film) can offer a way towards healing.  

Beyond Locarno, this film also connects well to the recently restored Nightshift by the British filmmaker Robina Rose (1981), which like Sirenen-Eiland can be seen as an intimate portrait of misfits and punks from the underground (which in today’s gentrified neighbourhoods of New York, Paris, and London, is much harder to find), or to the films of the avantgarde Swedish filmmaker Gunvor Nelson, recently seen at the Bologna festival Il Cinema Ritrovato, and in particular the astonishingly shot Take Off (1972), a humorous and critical take on the striptease. The fact that these films are being restored and revisited today in international venues dedicated to film heritage signals a long overdue appreciation for works by experimental women filmmakers that will hopefully continue. 

Nobody will be surprised to know that Hesse-Rabinovitch received little financial and institutional support during her life to create her work, especially from her home country, as is the case with far too many women artists, even now. In place of access to institutional support, she developed networking practices of her own, demonstrated in the active and ongoing support of other women artists, most evident in her creation of the first women’s film festival in Switzerland in 1975, but also present in smaller but not less significant gestures of solidarity as in for example sharing of film equipment and housing. Thanks to the important work of Liptay, Schmid, Henry, and others, Hesse-Rabinovitch’s work begins to finally receive the institutional recognition it deserves. Today, Hesse-Rabinovitch’s voice joins a growing international community of women artists committed to telling stories and making their voices heard, singing their siren songs over the sounds of male-led war, destruction, exploitation and genocide. May the sirens find one another, and may we sing, but also may we develop a practice of listening to and creating space for one another, as Hesse-Rabinovitch does so beautifully in Sirenen-Eiland. And may the screenings in Locarno be the first of many Hesse screenings to come.