Must-Watch: 'The Deepest Breath' — The Netflix Documentary Every Freediver Should See
This 2023 Netflix documentary follows Italian world champion Alessia Zecchini and Irish safety diver Stephen Keenan on parallel journeys toward the ocean — converging in one of the most haunting stories freediving has ever produced.
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About This Film
Directed by Laura McGann and released on Netflix in July 2023 following its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, The Deepest Breath interweaves two lives shaped entirely by the ocean. Alessia Zecchini grew up in Italy developing a rare gift for going deep on a single breath, eventually becoming one of the most decorated competitive freedivers in history, with multiple world championship titles in Constant Weight Apnea. Stephen Keenan grew up in Ireland, eventually leaving behind a conventional career to settle in Dahab, Egypt, where he became a beloved safety diver, instructor, and ocean advocate.
The film follows both their journeys separately, then shows how their paths converged — first in friendship and professional collaboration, then in the defining moment at Dean's Blue Hole in the Bahamas that changed everything.
What Makes It Exceptional
Most freediving films focus on performance — the depth, the time, the record number. McGann is interested in something harder to film: the interior life of a person who chooses to go to the edge of consciousness underwater, repeatedly and voluntarily. The film is about obsession, risk, and what it means to feel most alive in an environment that can kill you in minutes.
Alessia's journey is told with rare access to her training, competition dives, and the psychology behind her performances. Stephen's story — less well known outside the freediving community — reveals a person who found his purpose as a guardian for other divers, someone who made everyone around him safer even at cost to himself.
The cinematography captures both the beauty and the strangeness of competitive freediving: crystal-blue descent lines, the eerie silence of Dean's Blue Hole, the blackout warnings that coaches and safety divers watch for at the surface.
Why Freedivers Should Watch
Beyond the human story, the film serves as an unusually intimate look at what high-level freediving actually requires. You see the technical preparation, the mental rituals before a record attempt, the coordination between competitive divers and safety teams, and the physical and psychological toll of pushing the body toward its limits repeatedly over a season.
It is also an honest film about the risk that experienced freedivers accept — not naively or recklessly, but as a conscious trade with the ocean. For anyone who dives, that honesty resonates at a level that sports films rarely reach.