River Maid
Runtime: 16:52River Maid is a lyrical, song-like tale of an aging widower who is numbed by loss and marking time until the end. He encounters a mermaid who re-awakens his old sense of adventure.
Director - Colin J. Mason
Colin J. Mason is a director, editor, and writer from the Washington DC/Northern Virginia area. Colin has over 19 years of experience directing narrative and documentary films and has hundreds of documentary, commercial, and narrative credits to his name, shot in more than 17 countries across 5 continents.
His short narrative work has won dozens of awards for directing, editing and sound design, and has been featured in film festivals around the world, including the Mindfield Film Festival, Telluride Horror Show, and Dances with Films.
Directors Statement
When we think about fairy tales, we tend to picture princesses, dwarfs, wizards, and knights—stories that happened long ago, in places far away. But the tales we now think of as ancient didn’t begin that way. They started as the ghost stories and urban legends of their time, shaped by the fears, hopes, and landscapes of the people telling them, and only grew old through centuries of retelling. I’ve always felt we deserve our own version of that: stories that rise out of our shared culture and mythology, and that didn’t happen long ago or in some distant land.
River Maid comes from that belief, and I’m excited to finally bring it to life. The story is shaped by the Shenandoah River, near which I’ve lived for two-thirds of my adult life. But it's also about the uneasy, necessary act of stepping back into the world after loss, and the search of renewal and new adventure. It’s a folk tale in the truest sense I know: a story that could only come from one place, yet speaks beyond it: to many places, and to all times.
