Italian freediver Alessia Zecchini holds a world record in her class of taking only three minutes and 38 seconds to descend an ocean depth of 109 meters. And she was just 18 when she set a prior world record in the deadly sport of freediving — now the subject of Laura McGann’s documentary “The Deepest Breath,” hoping to become the “Free Solo” of diving docs when it streams on Netflix on July 19.
In “The Deepest Breath,” Zecchini describes the depths of the ocean as the only quiet place left on Earth as she readies to set a new world record in one of the most dangerous extreme sports ever — to reach underwater depths without scuba gear.
Freedivers are regularly subject to blackouts when they return to the surface — with safety divers like Irish adventure-seeker Stephen Keenan at the ready to assist. Forming a bond, the pair started training together after they fell in love with the sport in Dahab, Egypt. The documentary chronicles their attempts on Dahab’s Blue Hole, an 85-foot-long tunnel sitting 184 feet below the Red Sea.
From IndieWire’s review of the film out of the 2023 Sundance Film Festival, where “The Deepest Breath” made its world premiere in Park City: “The story of what happened to Alessia Zecchini and Stephen Keenan on that fateful day off the coast of Egypt is riveting enough to withstand some of the frustrations provoked by the way it’s told here. There’s a powerful symmetry to how these two people crossed paths and eventually — potentially — began to fall in love, and ‘The Deepest Breath’ lays it out with the clarity of Bahamian seawater.”
Watch the official trailer for “The Deepest Breath” below.
