When you watch a movie in a theater, you’re left to interpret the film for yourself. You may sit and digest the movie and come to your own conclusions (or look up what others say on the internet). But at SXSW, audiences have the privilege of hearing from the creatives themselves. After a screening, you’ll never know who may show up to answer audience questions — and you never know what you may glean about what you just watched.
Before and during the TV and film festival, I spoke with three filmmakers about their projects. Each of their films shared very different stories, but at the heart of each one was a desire to explore. Here’s what I learned.
“7 Beats Per Minute”
At first glance, the sport of freediving looks intense and scary. Imagine holding your breath for minutes at a time to dive hundreds of feet into the depths of the ocean. But in Yuqi Kang’s documentary “7 Beats Per Minute,” freediving becomes unexpectedly beautiful, emotional, and healing. “Freediving has a philosophical aspect, where it’s believed that all life originated from the sea, and sea water has a healing property,” Kang explains. “Being underwater feels like a sense of returning home … and freediving is a very stunning sport.”
When learning to freedive in Thailand, the Mongol Chinese Canadian filmmaker first heard of Jessea Lu, a pharmacologist by day, but best known for her title as a world freediving champion. The two were bonded by age and an experience of migrating to a foreign country as Asian women — and Kang was drawn to Lu’s unconventional path to such an extreme sport.
In 2019, Kang and her crew began following Lu, who only a year before had attempted a world record-setting dive, during which she blacked out and was lifeless for four minutes. For the next five years, Kang would quarantine with Lu and continue documenting the diver’s journey to face the traumas that her near-death experience resurfaced.
While a documentary director’s role…
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