The last day of the 2026 Dialogues Documentary Festival brought me to an evening showing of AMAZING LIVE SEA MONKEYS. It may have been the last film of the festival, but it certainly was not the least.
You’ll read me complain elsewhere about documentaries that kind of stick to a commercial template and kind of lull you into a pleasant but not very engaged state. You can feel the beats coming well in advance. Well, let me tell you, you’d have to be psychic to know where this film is going moment to moment.
Directed by Mark Becker and Aaron Schock, AMAZING LIVE SEA MONKEYS feels like a movie discovering itself moment to moment. It begins innocent enough, as a look at Yolanda Signoretti, the heiress to the Sea Monkey’s invention, as she lives her life caring for the wild animals inhabiting her crumbling farm, Grey Gardens style. At first you might think she’s just an eccentric, but the more you learn about her lawsuit against a toy company that has refused to pay her royalties for the sea monkeys brand and all the goodwill she and her late husband had built up over the years, the more you begin to side with her. Sure, it seems like it’s as silly and kitschy as the sea monkeys, aka brine shrimp, themselves. But you learn enough that her late husband and her had built something that delivered more than what you really could expect from a product advertised to kids in comic books in the 1960s and 1970s. They may have gone out of style when Frank Miller and Alan Moore, among others, started making comic books more appealing to teens and adults, but they were relatively innocent and Yolanda still dutifully fulfills the warranty on the product, despite not being paid. It’s kind of admirable. Especially since the toy company that bought the rights comes off as cartoonishly evil.
Alls well and good as a David vs. Goliath / Good vs. Evil story. Sure, Yolanda is eccentric and naive, but she’s also been wronged and is admirably stubborn.
And then the rug gets pulled as we learn about the dark side of Yolanda’s late husband. And it’s wild and takes turns that are hard to see coming. And which Yolanda probably has hid from herself, with selling the sea monkeys brand being a way to run from it. But, it’s gotten to the point where it needs to be confronted.
It’s admirable that the documentary presents information, but doesn’t particularly engage in judgment. It treats the audience like adults able to distinguish between shades of gray. It offers a possible explanation for some of the revelations, but it’s hardly definitive. It led to a really engaged Q&A session after the film that lived up to the title of the festival.
The 2026 Dialogues Documentary Film Festival ran from September 24 to 27, 2026. Further information on the festival, and films that screened can be found at Milwaukee Film’s website.
