The Last Mermaids - a different kind of film about women divers

The Last Mermaids is a short (19 minutes), multiple-award winning documentary by Liz Chae about the women of Jeju Island (located off of South Korea), who have been free-diving to sustain themselves and their families for over 2000 years.  Over the millenia, these women divers, called Haenyos, have had to fight many times to protect their right to earn a living by diving for shellfish.  You can see a clip of the film, here.


The women, up to 85 years old, are shown diving in much the same way as their mothers and grandmothers and countless generations before them did.  The Haenyos have continued skin-diving even though using scuba could increase their productivity.

But the Haenyos' traditions and lifestyle seem to be nearing an end.  Now that their daughters have access to higher education, the Haenyos of today do not want their children to become divers.  Rather than mourning the loss of their traditional culture, the women divers of Jeju celebrate that fact that their daughters will not spend their lives underwater. 

As much as it sounds sad to someone like me that such a powerful and longstanding tradition of self-sufficient women divers may be lost, it is also understandable that these women would want their daughters to have more options than they did.  I hope that as they get an education and move on to compete in a world still dominated by men in many arenas, the daughters of the Haenyos will continue to display the spirit and the strength that their female ancestors have for so many generations.