The Deepest Breath

Laura McGann's documentary begins by running two lives in parallel. The Italian freediver Alessia Zecchini has wanted to break a world record since childhood; the Irishman Stephen Keenan is a wanderer who found the sport in Dahab in Egypt and became a safety diver. In freediving, blacking out on the ascent from a record attempt is ordinary, and the safety diver's job is precisely to be there at that moment. The edit makes a deliberate choice, advancing the two stories separately and joining them only at their intersection. Some critics felt that turns a real tragedy into a narrative surprise; others that it makes the meeting feel inevitable. The central location is the Blue Hole at Dahab and its tunnel, roughly twenty-six metres long at a depth of fifty-six metres. Tim Cragg shot the film. It premiered at Sundance on 22 January 2023 and arrived on Netflix on 19 July 2023. Who it is for: viewers who like extreme sport and technically remarkable documentary. Who it is not for: anyone with claustrophobia or a fear of depth, or who objects to a real death being used as a narrative device.