DIVE!!

A diving club is on the edge of bankruptcy. To save it a woman coach returns from America to take charge and promises that a diver from the club will make the Japanese Olympic team. What follows is the training regime of the young people who now have to make good on that promise. The film gives sport not only as competition but as daily repetition: the same dive attempted hundreds of times, fear and exhaustion. The account does not turn the rivalry among the young into enmity, nor present losing as a catastrophe. The poolside is almost the film’s only setting. Kento Hayashi and Sosuke Ikematsu appear in Naoto Kumazawa’s hundred and fifteen minute Japanese film, completed in 2008.