Dolphin Man

Showings

Mary D. Fisher Theatre Tue, Jul 31, 2018 4:00 PM
Mary D. Fisher Theatre Tue, Jul 31, 2018 7:00 PM
Film Info
Event Type:Documentary Feature
Release Year:2017
Run Time:78 minutes
Production Country:Greece, France
Original Language:English
Trailer:https://youtu.be/jFDdAFglFAY
Cast/Crew Info
Director:Lefteris Cheritos

Description

“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.

Mayol was the first diver to reach 100 metres below the sea and revolutionized free-diving by introducing yoga and Zen techniques. He traveled across the world, promoting an urgent vision of our need to reconnect with nature.

From the Mediterranean to Japan and from India to the Bahamas, we meet Mayol’s closest friends and family, including his children Dottie and Jean-Jacques, and world free-diving champions William Trubridge, Mehgan Heaney-Grier and Umberto Pelizzari, to reveal the portrait of a man who reached the limits of the human body and mind, not just to break records but hoping to discover the deeper affinity between human beings and the sea.

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.

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 meters 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.