Freediving Documentaries, Films and Books Worth Your Time

If you only watch one freediving documentary, make it The Deepest Breath (2023, Netflix). It is the most honest film yet made about competitive freediving, and it will probably make you a more careful diver. After that, watch The Big Blue (1988) for the romance and the myth, then read Adam Skolnick’s One Breath and James Nestor’s Deep for the bigger picture. Manual of Freediving by Umberto Pelizzari and Stefano Tovaglieri is the reference book to keep beside your training mat.

Below is our short list, with notes on what each gets right, what to take with a pinch of salt, and who it suits. We’ve kept plot details to what you’d read on the back of the box.

The Deepest Breath (2023): the documentary freedivers talk about most

Directed by Laura McGann, The Deepest Breath follows two people: Alessia Zecchini, an Italian freediver chasing depth records, and Stephen Keenan, an Irish safety diver who built his life around the freediving scene in Dahab, on Egypt’s Red Sea coast. If you’ve read our guide to freediving in Dahab, you’ll recognise the Blue Hole and the town’s slow, salt-crusted pace.

The underwater footage is beautiful, and the competition sequences show what an official top, a countdown and a surface protocol actually look like. The film is also emotionally heavy. Watch it on an evening when you have time to sit with it afterwards, not on your phone during a commute.

For a newer diver, the most valuable thing is watching what safety divers do. Notice where they wait, how closely they watch a diver’s face on the way up, and how much of the sport rests on people whose names never appear on a results sheet. Everything in our guide to the freediving buddy system is visible on screen here, at a much higher level.

The Big Blue (1988): the film that made freediving famous

Luc Besson’s Le Grand Bleu sent a whole generation of Europeans to the swimming pool to see how long they could hold their breath. Jean-Marc Barr plays Jacques Mayol as a quiet man more at ease with dolphins than with people. Jean Reno plays Enzo Molinari, a loud, generous rival loosely based on Enzo Maiorca. Éric Serra’s score does a lot of the emotional work.

It is fiction. The real Mayol and Maiorca did push each other deeper through the 1960s and 70s, and Mayol is widely credited as the first person to descend to 100 metres on a single breath, in 1976. But the events and characters in the film are invented, and the real history of freediving is stranger and more interesting than the screenplay.

The film exists in more than one cut. The version first released in the United States had a different score and a re-edited ending, so if you can, find the international version with Serra’s music. Watch it for the mood. Don’t watch it for technique: the dives to depth on screen come with very little of the safety setup a real dive needs.

Safety: Films skip the dull parts that keep divers alive: the warm-up, the buddy on the surface, the lanyard, the recovery breaths. However calm the person on screen looks, never practise breath-holds in water alone, whether that’s the sea, a pool or a bathtub.

My Octopus Teacher and short films about freediving as a way of life

My Octopus Teacher (2020, Netflix) isn’t sold as a freediving documentary, but that’s what it is. Craig Foster freedives in a cold kelp forest near Cape Town, without a wetsuit, almost every day for a year, and slowly earns the trust of an octopus. It won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, and freedivers love it because it shows breath-hold diving with no numbers attached at all.

French freediver Guillaume Néry and filmmaker Julie Gautier have made a string of short films that are worth searching for. One Breath Around the World stitches together single-breath dives from many locations into what feels like one long descent. Watch them for body position: a relaxed neck, slow arms, no wasted movement. If you’re working on your streamlining, they make a better reference than most tutorials.

Narrative books: One Breath and Deep

One Breath: Freediving, Death, and the Quest to Shatter Human Limits by Adam Skolnick (2016) centres on American freediver Nicholas Mevoli and the 2013 Vertical Blue competition at Dean’s Blue Hole in the Bahamas. The subtitle tells you it’s not a light read. It is careful, well reported and fair to the people in it, and it’s the book we’d suggest to anyone who says they want to start competing. Read it alongside our explainer on how freediving competitions work.

Deep: Freediving, Renegade Science, and What the Ocean Tells Us About Ourselves by James Nestor (2014) begins with a journalist who goes to report on a freediving competition in Greece and can’t stop thinking about it afterwards. From there the book follows the ocean downwards, section by section, through whales, sharks, deep-sea science and the human body. It’s a very readable introduction to why the mammalian dive reflex fascinates scientists. Nestor writes as an enthusiastic outsider, so read the training anecdotes as story, not instruction.

Nestor’s later book, Breath (2020), is about everyday breathing rather than freediving. It’s popular and easy to read, though some of its claims are more debated among scientists than its confident tone suggests.

Manuals and reference books for training

Manual of Freediving: Underwater on a Single Breath by Umberto Pelizzari and Stefano Tovaglieri is the closest thing the sport has to a textbook. Pelizzari is a former Italian record holder who went on to found the Apnea Academy, and the book covers physiology, equalisation, training methods, nutrition and safety in detail. It’s long and dense. Read the chapter that answers this week’s question rather than trying to finish it cover to cover.

Treat any training tables in a book as general examples. Your coach can tell you which suit your level now and which to leave for a couple of seasons from now.

Homo Delphinus by Jacques Mayol sits at the other end of the shelf: part memoir, part philosophy, with plenty on yoga, breathing and his ideas about humans and the sea. It is very much a book of its time. If The Big Blue left you curious about the real man, this is where to find him in his own words.

Quick comparison: what to watch or read first

Title	Format	Made by	Best for
The Deepest Breath	Documentary, 2023	Laura McGann	Understanding competition and safety
The Big Blue	Feature film, 1988	Luc Besson	Mood, mythology, a rainy evening
My Octopus Teacher	Documentary, 2020	Pippa Ehrlich and James Reed	Freediving as a daily habit
One Breath	Book, 2016	Adam Skolnick	Anyone thinking about competing
Deep	Book, 2014	James Nestor	Curious beginners and science readers
Manual of Freediving	Reference book	Umberto Pelizzari and Stefano Tovaglieri	Divers in regular training
Homo Delphinus	Memoir and philosophy	Jacques Mayol	History lovers

How to watch freediving films with a coach’s eye

Once you’ve done a course, films become training material. Next time you watch, look for these:

• Count the safety divers. On any serious dive to depth, someone meets the diver on the way up. If nobody is there, the scene has been edited or the dive was unsafe.
• Watch the first 30 seconds after surfacing. Real divers do hook breaths and a surface protocol. Compare what you see with our guide to recovery breathing.
• Look at faces and necks. Relaxed divers look almost bored. Tension shows up in shoulders and jaws long before it shows up in the numbers.
• Notice what’s missing. Warm-up dives, turned dives, ear trouble and long surface intervals rarely make the final cut, though they make up most of real training.

A film-and-book list for the monsoon months

From June to September, when much of the west coast is too rough to dive, a film night is a decent use of a training week. Watch The Deepest Breath with your pool buddies, then talk about what the safety team did and what you’d want from yours. Read One Breath before you sign up for your first competition, and keep the Pelizzari manual for the questions that come up after each session.

An online community for Indian freedivers is on its way here at freediving.in, so stay tuned.