Deep under the ocean, the human heart can slow to seven beats per minute. For Jessea Lu, a champion competitive freediver, that’s where she felt most at peace. That is, until she came face to face with death. While attempting a world record dive in the Bahamas in 2018, Jessea lost consciousness and stopped breathing for four minutes, forcing her to confront parts of her life and past she had long buried. Years later, Jessea returns, ready to dive again and become reborn.
An amateur freediver herself, filmmaker Yuqi Kang develops a friendship with Jessea over years of filming. Layering insights on the nature of freediving alongside sublime images of the ocean’s depths, Kang explores Jessea’s obsessive desire to submerge herself, documenting her own inability to be an impartial observer as the lines between friend and filmmaker become murky. Developing an active role in Jessea’s recovery process as they bond over unresolved emotional trauma, Kang captures the search for freedom and the struggle to find a place in the world to feel at home.
Sept 30 & Oct 2: Q&A with director Yuqi Kang
Presented by
Media Partner
Community Partner
Jessea Lu
Canada
2024
In English and Mandarin with English subtitles
Book Tickets
Indigenous & Community Access
Indigenous Access Tickets Community Access Tickets Ticket Donation Requests
Credits & Director
Executive Producer
Ina Fichman, Shirley Vercruysse, Anita Lee, Kate Baxter, Neerai Bhargava
Producer
Ina Fichman, Sherien Barsoum
Screenwriter
Yuqi Kang
Cinematography
Kalina Bertin, Alex Lampron
ANIM
Kara Blake
Editor
Dominique Champagne
Original Music
Frannie Holder, Mario Sévigny, Lauren Bélec
Yuqi Kang
Yuqi Kang is a Mongol Chinese Canadian filmmaker. She is driven by a passion for crafting psychological profiles set in extreme circumstances. Her directorial feature debut, A Little Wisdom (2017), premiered at Busan, SXSW, Karlovy Vary, and Hot Docs, where it won Best Canadian Feature. It was released by Amazon Prime worldwide. Yuqi was nominated for the Asia Pacific Screen Awards and the Directors Guild of Canada’s Discovery Award and was awarded 40 Under 40 by DOC NYC.
Filmography: A Little Wisdom (2017)
Missing VIFF? Check Out What's Playing at the VIFF Centre
Once Upon a Time in Harlem
Once Upon a Time in Harlem splices together footage shot by William Greaves in 1972 of a group of Harlem Renaissance luminaries in conversation at Duke Ellington’s townhouse. The film is a living archive of memory, disagreement, style, and Black genius.
Get Out
Guess who's coming to dinner? Daniel Kaluuya is the Black boyfriend justifiably anxious about meeting his white girlfriend's folks for the first time in Jordan Peele's satiric modern horror classic, one of a series curated by our VIFF+ Premium members.
Possible Love
Lee Chang-dong’s first film since Burning (2018) is a sardonic, slow-burning satire about two couples: a documentary filmmaker married to a wealthy businessman, and a working-class family struggling to make ends meet after the husband has been laid off.
The Haunting
Directed by Robert Wise in 1963, The Haunting is a classic exercise in the suggestive power of cinema, adapted from Shirley Jackson's 1959 best-seller, The Haunting of Hill House, a provocative blend of supernatural and psychological horror.
A. Rimbaud
Patrick Wang (The Bread Factory) presents the life of French poet Arthur Rimbaud in this staggeringly adventurous and deeply considered movie, a three-hour, one-man show quite unlike anything we have seen before. "Poetic, audacious and singular."