BOOKS & CULTURE // No Man Is An Island
The Deepest Breath
Netflix, 2023
Documentary film
EXCERPT //
Dahab, Egypt — The Deepest Breath explores the world of extreme freediving through the lives of champion diver Alessia Zecchini and safety diver Stephen Keenan. “She had some supernatural power with freediving. But the pool was too small for Alessia. The sea was really her home,” says a rival diver-turned-friend. The “Blue Hole” in Dahab, Egypt, has, according to the documentary, claimed more than 100 lives. (Mount Everest, for comparison, has claimed approximately 300.) A break in the coral reef allows the divers down, but if they veer off course, above them is 30 meters of unnavigable sea-made rock before a break in the surface they’ll never get to. The videos of the divers are disorienting. While they must work at first to get further and further under the surface—using sometimes just a rope to pull themselves down and other times fins—at about 30 meters, the pressure of the ocean begins to pull them down in a state called “free fall.” While that might seem a terrifying prospect when you’re operating on a single breath, “This is, for me, the best part,” says Zecchini in a voiceover. “It feels like flying. It feels like being in the last quiet place on Earth.” As the divers go further and further down—Zecchini still holds the world record in the “constant weight” category at 404 feet—they grab onto little plastic chips that they must bring to the surface to prove the depth to which they’ve dived. It was hard not to think of them as the opposite of sobriety coins—proof that for some people, no matter what they want to achieve or grasp after, it’s never enough to fill the hunger inside them, and at times, their own single-minded vision pulls them into the abyss. //
For full text and images, consider reading RQ in print, on a Sunday afternoon, sun streaming through your window, coffee in hand, and nary a phone alert within sight or in earshot… just fine words, fine design, and the opportunity to make a stitch in time. // Subscribe or buy a single issue today. // Print is dead. Long live print. //