How deep can you go on a single breath?

“Dolphin Man” tells the life story of Jacques Mayol, the greatest free-diver in recorded history, whose life became the inspiration for Luc Besson’s cult-movie “The Big Blue”. It draws us into Mayol’s world, capturing his compelling journey from Japan to Europe, North America and India, while immersing viewers into the sensory and transformative experience of free-diving.

Born in Shanghai in 1927, Mayol was taught to dive by Japanese fishermen during family holidays on the island of Karatsu. With the outbreak of WWII, the freedom he had experienced as a child in the East was lost, when his family returned to France.

Jacques Mayol in the Bahamas, March 1994

After the war, he found freedom working with dolphins at the Miami Seaquarium, and gradually became interested in diving deeper and longer underwater. He became the first man to reach 100 metres below the sea on a single breath in 1976 and revolutionized free-diving by combining yoga and Zen, while promoting an urgent vision of our need to reconnect with nature.

Narrated by Jean-Marc Barr, the actor who famously portrayed Mayol in “The Big Blue”, the film weaves together rare film archive from the 1950’s onwards, with stunning contemporary underwater photography, to discover how the ‘dolphin man’ revolutionized free-diving and brought a new consciousness to our relationship to nature and to our inner-selves.

The feature doc is accompanied by “Dolphin Man”, three virtual reality films, which immerse the viewer into the sea.

Poster of “Dolphin Man” movie

| January 2019 |