“A little world theater seen by women, Siren Island presents modern Sirens in a variety of performances for which everyday reality serves as the stage set. These women and their songs combined with the four elements of life--air, water, earth and fire--build a story in images and associations which leads into visionary and unconscious fields, where archetypal symbols and myths emerge....” (Isa Hesse-Rabinovitch)
Reporting in Film Comment from the Venice Film Festival in 1981, Harlan Kennedy called Siren Island “a real find--a stream-of-consciousness from Switzerland.... The spectator is Ulysses lured onto a multi-level island bohemia by the siren song of 1980s subculture. The images are Dadaism at its most daffy and DeLuxe, from the slinky vamp crooning ‘Moon of Alabama' at a waxwork of Jimmy Carter, suit and grin intact, to the lady snake-dancer juggling giant pythons with a nervous smile. The metaphor that binds it all together is the stratification of the human mind, from surface taboos and proprieties of the super-ego to the deep-down ferality and non-sequiters of the id.”
Isa Hesse-Rabinovitch has directed a number of short films and organized the 1975 Women's Film Festival in Zurich. Siren Island is a film made primarily by women; among the cinematographers is Babette Mangold.