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SYNOPSIS

In this supernatural dark comedy, a pathetic Irish fishmonger must survive a sex pact with an ancient fish creature in order to save his mother’s soul from burning in hell.

DIRECTOR BIO

Neil Ferron is an LA-based writer/director from Seattle. His first feature screenplay, FISHMONGER, a supernatural dark comedy about tentacle sex and vulnerability, won the Grand Prize of the Slamdance Screenplay Competition (2021). His AFI thesis, a short film version of FISHMONGER, received a Cannes Lions Young Directors Award (2023) before its world premiere at Fantastic Fest and its European premiere at Sitges International Fantastic Film Festival of Catalonia.

Neil’s work has been described as “wonderfully surreal” (Sub Pop), “shocking, horrific, and funny” (Rolling Stone), and a “Ph.D testing of what ‘works’ on the human consciousness” (Seattle Weekly).

Neil is a recent graduate of the AFI Conservatory. He holds a Masters in Theatre & Performance from Trinity College Dublin thanks to a George J. Mitchell Scholarship.

DIRECTOR STATEMENT

Despite all the hell-blisters and tentacle sex, FISHMONGER is a very personal film. I spent the majority of my life deeply wanting to be somebody else. I hated my body, I hated my belly, my hair, my chipmunk cheeks, my inability to talk to girls or play sports. As an altar boy, I would literally kneel in front of a crucifix and beg god, “Please make me like Chip Reno” (Chip was the coolest boy in my sixth grade class). Everything that Christie feels in this story—self-loathing, inadequacy, fear—is something that I struggle with. To this extent, FISHMONGER is wild and weird comedy born out of lumpy vulnerability.

Also, this film is an elegy. In 2017, my Uncle Tom took his life. Tom was a 6’5” ER nurse with a ZZ Top beard and a laugh that sounded like a choking hyena. An unforgettable weirdo. Tom’s death ripped a hole in my family, and it ripped open something in me. I have struggled with anxiety and suicidal ideations all my adult life, and when Tom killed himself, it felt like I had permission to do the same. So FISHMONGER is my attempt to celebrate and mourn Tom—to hope that, in his final moments, he imagined something wild, ridiculous, and beautiful in his final moments. And it’s also my attempt to start a conversation with myself and others about suicide, to speak the unspeakable act in hopes of keeping it at bay.