Alessia Zecchini is getting ready to dive. Nose pegged firmly shut, she sucks in a few final breaths of air through pursed lips as the countdown begins.
On zero, she flips over and powers down into the endless blue ocean.
“World record attempt,” the overseer calls. For Alessia, so begins a journey into the depths of the sea, sound-tracked by the beating of her heart, as she attempts to reach 110m. Watching her is Stephen Keenan, her safety diver, waiting to jump into action and bring her to the surface the minute she starts showing signs of distress.
For the viewer, it’s an intense introduction to the extreme sport of freediving: the focus of Netflix’s new documentary The Deepest Breath. Freediving has existed in one form or another since ancient times: it refers to the practice of diving without any mechanical equipment, and holding a single breath, staying under for minutes on end.
It’s dangerous; sometimes, people die. Often, they’ll black out on their way to the surface, relying on safety divers to bring them round before they drown. And yet they keep coming back, attempting, like Alessia, to reach new lows.
As you might expect, this is a small, close-knit community – which makes it all the more surprising that the director behind it, Laura McGann, was entirely new to the sport when she set out to make the film.
“I read about Stephen and Alessia in The Irish Times,” she tells me over Zoom. “I didn’t know anything about it, so I Googled, ‘What is freediving?’”
What this revealed stunned her. “I love Blue Planet and marine documentaries and stuff. And all of a sudden, I’m seeing that, but human beings, behaving more like seals and dolphins… there was just a fluidity to the imagery that I had never seen before and I was really taken aback.”
From there, McGann read more about Italian-born Alessia – now the world-record holder for freediving several times over – and her diving safety partner Stephan Keenan, and, as she puts it, “fell in love.”
Several chats later, including with Stephan’s dad Peter (who happened to live across the road from McGann) and the project was in full swing. Did she do any diving of her own while researching the documentary?
“I did a tiny bit of free diving, down [to] about three metres, when I had a whole lot of people around me to help me,” she says. The bulk of her research, though, involved talking to the free-diving community.
“[They] really wanted this story to be told,” she says. “With a safety diver and a diver, even if they’ve never met before, the diver is putting their life in the hands of the safety diver… they’re trusting when they go down [and black out], that safety diver is gonna hold their nose, hold their airway shut, and bring them to the surface until they come back around.
“Going through that process with somebody creates this trust. It’s like the ultimate trust exercise, I suppose.”
She also had her own reasons for thanking a safety diver: filming involved taking a trip to Mexico’s cenotes, or natural swimming caves, where McGann managed to capture the stunning image on the film’s poster and take shots of free divers at work.
“We did the shots in the sea and got back into the boat and one of the safeties said, ‘You know, there was a bull shark in the water the whole time,’” she says.
“And I was like, ‘what?’ He said, ‘Yeah, but he was far enough away. I was keeping an eye on him. Like, if he came any closer, I would have told you,’ and I was like, ‘I would have been out of that water so fast.’”
Unsurprisingly, the free diving community is one that’s experienced its fair share of tragedy. In addition to the tragic end to Stephen and Alessia’s story (which we won’t spoil here), accidents and even deaths are not uncommon. In 2015, world champion Natalia Molchanova went missing while giving a private lesson off the coast of Spain. Late in the film, Alessia attempts to cross ‘the arch’: a coral passage in the Red Sea so notorious for claiming lives it has been nicknamed the ‘divers’ cemetery’.
“It is a very tight-knit community because of that, but also a very open community, and a community that has been through a lot,” McGann says. “[They] have learned a lot and are doing everything they can to mitigate the risks involved and becoming more open about that, and that blackouts are part of the sport and that’s just what it is.”
Despite that, she’s adamant that The Deepest Breath is, above everything else, a love story. The documentary follows Alessia and Steve as they grow up, fall in love with the sport, and eventually meet at Vertical Blue, one of the world’s most famous competitions for free divers.
“It was always a story of two people coming together. From the word go, it just felt like they were kind of destined to come together; destined for something amazing to happen when they did,” she says.
“The reason why we told their backstories, the stories of them coming together was because you just felt a sense of anticipation: something’s going to happen when these two people come together, what is it going to be?”
Her ode to the pair is due to hit screens after an early preview at Sundance Festival met with a rapturous reception – perhaps not surprising, given the intensity of its subject material.
“It’s really quite remarkable that when I’d be outside the cinema, lots of people would come up to me. Interestingly, a lot of men in their late 30s, 40s and 50s will come out with tears in their eyes, to talk to me,” she muses. “It’s maybe not the most expected reaction from that cohort, but their reactions have been really heartfelt.”
Though McGann doesn’t fancy herself as a free diver, she does love the ocean, moving to the coast with her wife in order to be by the sea. As we wrap up, I ask McGann what she thinks keeps people coming back to the ocean.
“I swim as often as I can,” she tells me. “It’s a really gorgeous feeling. It’s like a drug, especially if you go in the winter and it’s four degrees. You come out and you’ve never felt fresher.
“I think it does a lot for people,” she concludes. “Everybody who loves the sea... they have something in common.”
