documentaries
In the Netflix documentary The Deepest Breath, we meet people who are willing to risk their lives to dive more than 300 feet
“The Deepest Breath”, a compelling new documentary about a pivotal partnership in the world of freediving, introduces one of its main subjects, world champion diver Alessia Zecchini, undeterred on the move. In one moment, she drives a car down an unassuming stretch of the Bahamas and answers an unseen passenger’s question about mortality. “To be honest, I don’t think about death,” she says in Italian, her mother tongue. “I’m not afraid of death. I never thought that freediving could cause death.” Next she is in the water, holding the starting position for a competitive freediver and taking a deep breath that she must hold for more than three minutes.
The Deepest Breath Review – stunning Netflix documentary about freediving
At the signal, her lithe body shoots down like an arrow. The camera follows them, hand for hand, along a vertical rope, then in free fall – past other divers with cameras, past the top and bottom lip of a coral shelf, past every differentiation in the vast blue, past the color blue at all, some 100 meters (328 feet) deep. And then all the way back up, hand over hand. It’s been such an agonizingly long time without breath that as I watched, my breath caught. The only accompaniment to the scene is an ever-slowing heartbeat, which causes him to faint. Zecchini’s body starts to twitch because it needs air. In competitive freediving, you either return to the surface under your own steam—and signal “OK” to qualify for a continuity dive—or you don’t and need the help of a team of safety divers to get you airborne, sometimes at Awareness, sometimes requiring immediate resuscitation.
Such is the rhythm of The Deepest Breath, a film of obsessive ambition and fated connection that, in its rhapsodic stillness, focus and grandeur, features many breathtaking sequences of freedives – human beings a mere speck in the endless blue, graceful as a mermaid – and its peril . Blackouts are not uncommon, scenes are both urgent and routine: divers are pinned to the surface, eyes grotesquely wide, hypoxic brains frozen until breath is restored. The Deepest Breath is a sensitive, albeit wide-eyed and inquisitive approach to an extreme sport that brings with it the worst of fears for many people. The film’s Irish director, Laura McGann, first learned about freediving through a newspaper article. “It was like discovering that there is a group of people who can fly,” she said.
As a community of people who can go unbelievably long without air at unimaginable depths shows that the act of freediving exerts a magnetic pull that transcends the urge of competition. It is elemental, primal – a single breath, an abysmal stillness, an immense depth. There’s “this initial headline that it’s an extreme and dangerous sport and they all have a terrible death wish and that’s just not the case,” McGann said. “I wanted to address that headline because it exists, but I also wanted to go beyond that and recognize that there’s another side to it, which is that it’s an anti-adrenal sport. It’s about being extremely meditative, dropping your heart rate like a Tibetan monk and clearing your head.”
At the heart of The Deepest Breath, however, is the life-changing connection between two of the sport’s greatest athletes. On the day of the filming scene, at the 2017 Vertical Blue competition in the Bahamas (the Wimbledon of freediving, we learn), the competition’s head of safety, Stephen Keenan, was in the water with Zecchini. The Irishman had been a lovable wanderer, traveling the world and making friends. He was an avid self-documentator, and the film’s stunning collage of archival footage reveals an easygoing flair with sparkling, kind blue eyes and a quick laugh.
Keenan fell in love with freediving on a trip to Egypt and turned his attention to training and safety after setting an Irish record and suffering a particularly bad blackout. He established a freediving school in Dahab, a diving mecca in the southeastern Red Sea known for its waterhole and mortality. According to some estimates, nearly 200 people have died diving in the Blue Hole and its nearby arch, a coral cavern 55 meters (181 feet) below the surface, over the past few decades. He also became one of the most respected safety divers in the sport. The Deepest Breath includes footage of Keenan’s life-threatening rescue in 2013 of Alexey Molchanov, the world record holder and son of Natalia Molchanova, the pioneering freediver who lived in her own stratosphere of success until Zecchini and her rival Hanako Hirose went to the finish line their record stack. (Molchanova disappeared while freediving off the coast of Spain in 2015 at the age of 53.)
Stephen Keenan and Alessia Zecchini in Deepest Breath. Photo: Courtesy of Netflix
Zecchini and Keenan clicked immediately. She had the ambition, the talent and the fiery tenacity to do the seemingly impossible; He had the calm, the wit, and the experience to do it safely. “They have that reputation and that response,” McGann said of their clear and quick connection, which ran deeper than coach and athlete and seemed more intense than friendship, but didn’t explicitly take the form of romance, at least not in the descriptions of friends and family . “It is clear: what one person has too much, another lacks. And what is missing in one is in the other [has] – You are like the missing part of the other. And you just have a feeling that once they get together it’s going to be something incredible.”
What happened after they met in 2017 is public knowledge, but the film treats it as a plot that unfolds as you watch. “I don’t google any movies at all before watching them. McGann said. “So I just thought no, hopefully people will just sit down and watch the film and go on the journey with Stephen and Alessia.” But it’s clear — in interviews with Zecchinis and Keenans dads, in the wistful way other divers recall Keenan’s lively energy, in their use of the past tense to refer to him – that something went horribly wrong in their pursuit of freediving greatness.
Some reviews have questioned the role of Keenan and Zecchini’s partnership and Keenan’s accident in 2017 as a source of tension. McGann described the structure as organic to Keenan’s life and not a consequence of the tragedy of his death. “I felt his story deserved to be told in the present, to really enjoy it and get a feel for what he was trying to do, rather than just knowing what happened and looking back.” , she said. “There’s a certain lens you look through when you know certain things. And I just thought his story deserved to be treated a little differently” — although “it was never entirely taken for granted that we can actually tell the story the way we did,” she added, “because of all dem.” depended on getting x, y, and z archive pieces,” including footage of his travels and 13 hours of interviews with Keenan about his life—“the play that made it all possible”—contained on a USB Stick.
The film, McGann said, was supported by Keenan’s father, Peter, and the freediving community, who “really held my hand and guided me through the whole story.” This openness resulted from Keenan’s reputation as a popular safety diver. “It’s the ultimate confidence exercise as a diver,” McGann said of Keenan’s role. “When you descend, you put your life in the hands of your safety diver. And you trust that if anything goes wrong, that person will get you back on the air. And he did that for so many people.”
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