‘It’s an anti-adrenaline sport’: inside the dangerous world of freediving
The Deepest Breath, a riveting new documentary on a pivotal partnership in the world of freediving, introduces one of its primary subjects, the world champion diver Alessia Zecchini, in motion, unfazed. One moment, she’s driving a car down a nondescript stretch of the Bahamas, responding to a question from an unseen passenger about mortality. “Honestly, I don’t think about death,” she says in Italian, her native language. “I’m not afraid of death. I’ve never thought freediving could lead to death.” The next, she’s in the water, holding the start position for a competitive freediver, sucking in deep gulps of air that will have to sustain her for more than three minutes.
At the signal, her lithe body shoots down like an arrow. The camera tracks her, hand over hand along a vertical rope, then in freefall – past other divers with cameras, past the upper and lower lips of a coral shelf, past any differentiation in the vast blue, past the color blue at all, some 100 meters (328ft) down. And then all the way back up, hand over hand. It’s such an excruciatingly long time without breath that, watching it, I began to lose mine. The scene is soundtracked only by an everslowing heartbeat, fainting away. Zecchini’s body starts twitching, in need of air. In competitive freediving, you either return to the surface under your own power – signaling “OK” to qualify a passing dive – or you don’t, requiring assistance from a team of safety divers to ferry you to air, sometimes conscious, sometimes requiring immediate resuscitation.
Such is the rhythm of The Deepest
Breath, a film on obsessive ambition and fateful connection which features many a stunning sequence of freediving in its rhapsodic silence, focus and scale – humans as a mere speck in the endless blue, graceful as a mermaid – and its peril. Blackouts are not uncommon, scenes both urgent and routine: divers held up at the surface, eyes grotesquely wide, the hypoxic brain frozen until breath is restored. The Deepest Breath takes a sensitive, if wide-eyed and curious, approach to an extreme sport synonymous with many people’s worst fears. The film’s Irish director, Laura McGann, first learned about freediving through a newspaper article. “It was like discovering that there was a group of people that could fly,” she said.
As evinced by a community of people who can go without air for unbelievable amounts of time, at unfathomable depths, there’s a magnetic pull to the act of freediving, beyond the drive of competition. It’s elemental, primal – single breath, chasmic quiet, vast deep. There’s “this initial headline of it being like an extreme and dangerous sport, and do they all have some kind of an awful death wish, and that’s just not the case,” said McGann. “I wanted to address that headline, because it does exist, but also just get beyond it, and to see that there’s another side to it, which is that it’s an antiadrenaline sport. It’s about being super meditative, lowering your heart rate like that of a Tibetan monk, clearing your mind.”
The core of The Deepest Breath, however, is the life-altering bond between two of the sport’s highest practitioners. In the water with Zecchini the day of the film’s scene, at the 2017 Vertical Blue competition in the Bahamas (the Wimbledon of freediving, we learn), was the competition’s chief of safety, Stephen Keenan. The Irishman had been a lovable itinerant, traveling and befriending the world. He was an avid self-documenter, and the film’s impressive collage of archival footage reveals an easy hang with twinkling, kind blue eyes and a quick laugh.
Keenan fell in love with freediving while traveling in Egypt and, after setting an Irish record and experiencing a particularly bad blackout, turned his attention to training and safety. He established a freedive school at Dahab, a diving mecca in the southeastern Red Sea known for its aqua sinkhole 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 (181ft) beneath the surface, in the past few decades. He also became one the sport’s most respected safety divers. The Deepest Breath includes footage of Keenan’s life-threatening 2013 rescue of Alexey Molchanov, the world recordholder and son of Natalia Molchanova, the pioneering female freediver who existed in her own stratosphere of accomplishments until Zecchini and her rival, Hanako Hirose, took aim at her stack of records. (Molchanova disappeared in 2015, while freediving off the coast of Spain, at the age of 53.)
Zecchini and Keenan clicked immediately. She had the ambition, talent and fiery stubbornness to do what seems impossible; he had the calmness, reason and experience to do it safely. “There’s this call and response with them,” said McGann of their clear and swift connection, which went deeper than coach and athlete and seemed more intense than friendship, but did not explicitly take the form of romance, at least in descriptions from friends and family. “It’s clear that what one has too much of, the other one is missing. And what one is missing, the other one [has] – they’re like each other’s missing piece. And you just kind of feel, once they do come together, that it is going to be something incredible.”
What happened after their meeting in 2017 is public information, but the film treats it as plot, developing as you watch. “I don’t Google films before I go and see them, at all. Why would you?” said McGann. “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 Zecchini and Keenan’s fathers, in the wistful way fellow divers recall Keenan’s buoyant energy, in the use of the past tense to refer to him – that something in their pursuit of freediving greatness went horribly wrong.
Some reviews have questioned playing Keenan and Zecchini’s partnership, and Keenan’s 2017 accident, for suspense. McGann described the structure as organic to Keenan’s life, rather than owing to the tragedy of his death. “I felt like his story deserved to be told in the present, to really enjoy, to get a sense of what he was trying to do, rather than just knowing what happened and looking back,” she said. “There’s a certain lens that you look through when you know certain things. And I just thought that his story deserved to be treated in a slightly different way” – although “it was never completely a given that we’d actually be able to tell the story the way we did,” she added, “because it all depended on getting x, y and z pieces of archive,” including footage of his travels and 13 hours of interviews with Keenan about his life – “the piece that made it all poss