But also, you can only do these exceptionally deep dives in a few places on Earth because you need a continuous kind of waterfall to dive into. These places happen to be some of the most beautiful places on Earth – not just the Bahamas but also parts of Southeast Asia just off the coast of Nice. This is another thing that attracts people to the world of freediving.
With any story in a magazine, you have specific limits: there is space, deadlines, etc. Sometimes there may be a feeling that even though the story is finished and published, there are still things happening off the page. The story continues. What themes were you looking forward to seeing in the documentary?
Perhaps the first is that the magazine’s story mainly focuses on Alexei breaking the world record and clearly being the best. However, you do not have the ability to see what happens over time.
When Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022, he, like many Russian athletes, was not allowed to compete in the sport. So, during 2022, all of his world records were taken from him by other divers. And so we begin 2023, where he’s allowed to start competing again, with this combined goal of getting all those world records back and then trying to get the one world record he’s never had — which is diving without fins, the pure, natural, no… Help descend. So the documentary has an amazing built-in plot engine, You were the best, global geopolitics meant you had to lose all those records, and now you’re going to try to get them back one by one.
The thing that struck me while reading your article and watching the film is that you would expect someone like Alexei, who competes in this type of sport at this level, to almost have this isolated psychosis. But, by all accounts, he seems like a lovely, normal guy. Is this accurate?
It’s accurate. I guess another way to say it is that he almost has this thing, Oh, you’re so quiet that you can’t even express the intensity and craziness of what you’re doing. You have a lot of voices in the film questioning some of his decisions and where the lines are. It reminds me of racing car driving a little bit, where sometimes these guys don’t interpret the limits of racing as dangerous or on the verge of death and are very calm about it.
