7 BEATS PER MINUTE (SXSW2024) – Review by Valerie Kalfrin
Free divers love Dean’s Blue Hole in the Bahamas, a place to plunge with no current and little wind, tucked within a lagoon surrounded by natural rock on three sides.
This spectacular natural phenomenon is more than 600 feet deep. On a world-record attempt diving 93 meters with no air tank, Jessea Lu almost died there.
The documentary 7 Beats Per Minute, which debuted at the 2024 SXSW Film Festival, explores Lu’s near-fatal dive and her struggles in the aftermath. Written and directed by Yuqi Kang (A Little Wisdom), it’s a portrait of resilience and astonishing determination that perhaps few viewers—certainly those not in competitive sports—can comprehend.
The film combines intense underwater cinematography with frank interviews and introspective voiceover in Chinese from Kang herself. It’s named after the divers’ ability to slow their heartbeats when diving.
Kang began documenting Lu’s dives and training years before the 2018 Vertical Blue event where she almost died. Both Chinese, the women bonded over free diving, although Lu’s experience is more spiritual. A scientist who lives in Hawaii, Lu incorporated the word “sea” into her first name to reflect her love of water and learned to free dive after first studying scuba diving.
Feeling her blood shift and her heart rate slow as she dives, Lu says she feels safe, content, everything in her life condensed to just what she needs. Minimal sound and music accompanying underwater footage heightens this cocoon-like feeling, as if the whole world drops away, narrowing to the tiniest focus.
Lu learns to hold her breath for six minutes, then more than ten, wondering what else is possible and what fears she can conquer. Not wanting to limit herself to any environment, she challenges herself to dive in Antarctica. Kang and her crew, including cinematographers Kalina Bertin, Alexandre Lampron, and Scott Alexander Ruderman, follow along, with breathtaking footage that almost feels surreal as Lu in her wetsuit clambers on a glacier underwater. When on land, she flings out her arms, triumphant, editor Dominique Champagne mirrors her joy with a penguin flapping its wings.
The film crew again shadows Lu on her world-record attempt at the Vertical Blue Free Diving Competition in the Bahamas, where a weighted rope and a safety line helps divers find their way in the dark. Lu made it to 93 meters inside the blue hole within about four minutes, removing a tag as proof of her depth. But as she clawed her way back to the surface, she blacked out.
Fortunately, safety divers several feet below the surface rushed her to the top, where CPR revived her. Although we know she survived, the footage is harrowing.
It turns out that while going deep, past traumas and thoughts can surface, wrecking your focus, interviewees share. It’s like a mirror that’s magnified, one says.
Nearly dying crystalizes for Lu how unloved she’s felt and how cruel her mother has been because of “her own monsters of emotions.” Yet she also doesn’t want this experience to keep her from trying again. As someone else notes, she has a perpetual need to prove herself and feel accepted.
7 Beats Per Minute takes an intriguing turn when Lu asks Kang to train as one of her safety divers for another Vertical Blue attempt. Kang is caught between feeling she can’t say no, as someone whom Lu trusts, and also that she’s crossing a line with her film’s subject. The two women spar, with Lu questioning Kang’s support and friendship and Kang wondering what more she can do.
While I wish the film had explored this a bit more, 7 Beats Per Minute is an absorbing and poetic dive into the psyche of someone who pushes herself farther than some are willing to go.
