K3 en Het Lied van de Zeemeermin

The Belgian-Dutch girl group K3 are a franchise unto themselves, with music, stage shows and movies as their creative output. One of the movies in their ouevre is K3 en Het Lied van de Zeemeermin (K3 and the Song of the Mermaid), a musical adventure where the girls are on holiday and two of them encounter a magical spell that transforms them into mermaids when they get in contact with water. As most people of the holiday town view merfolk as monstrous creatures, the trio have to rely on each other to figure out what happened and how to break the spell before their condition becomes permanent. The title gives a clue for the second one!

K3 has changed members over the years, so the specific trio in this film are Hanne (Verbruggen), Marthe (De Pillecyn) and Julia (Boschman). The movie is a vehicle for the girls to sing and dance and get up to shenanigans, and since they're pop stars it makes sense that the movie's focus is on them, and the mermaid angle is a casual trope like the many others they've used in their films and shows to have fun with. To that end, there are some underwater scenes that are beautifully shot and have elaborate tails, but these are brief, and they were filmed with professional mermaids as the actresses' stand-ins: Celine Van de Voorde as Hanne, Jilke van de Kamp as Marthe, and Alexia Greco and Anke Tijsmans as Julia; along with Adam Boutchie, Pieter Germeys and Alexis Vassal as Kai the merman. These underwater scenes are intercut with studio close-ups of the actors that show their faces.