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 ever-slowing 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.
