7 Beats Per Minute: Of Consciousness and Human Connection
by Gaura Singh
On the surface, 7 Beats Per Minute is about freediving and the prodigy champion Jessea Lu. But at its core, it is a story of emotional suppression and discovery, unshakeable determination, and the profound act of breathing.
The film opens with the words, “I’ve heard a mother’s amniotic fluid is almost identical to seawater. In extreme depths, it becomes nearly still, dropping as low as seven beats per minute.” This is a striking introduction to the heart of this documentary, which is full of heartfelt moments and insightful words from Jessea and director Yuqi Kang.
The documentary centers a remarkable female diver, Jessea Lu, and her journey with freediving as a means to self exploration. Despite her demanding career as a full-time medical consultant, Jessea Lu quickly ascends to consistent top 10 rankings in international competitions within just a few years of training part-time. Across its 100 minute run-time, the film touches upon freediving breathing techniques and training, Jessea’s lifestyle, spirituality, her near death experience while attempting to make the world record, and her difficult relationship with her mother.
Jessea Lu is calm, inspiring, reflective, and mysterious, and the documentary takes shape around her as a meditative thriller, revealing itself in seamless layers. Yuqi Kang, along with Kalina Bertin and Alex Lampron, creates beautiful visuals with hues of blue, exposing the poetic otherworldliness of freediving underwater that Jessea repeatedly describes in her interviews. The score by Frannie Holder, Mario Sévigny, and Lauren Bélec blurs the lines between trance and ambient, creating a very natural presence that helps dive deeper into the emotional undercurrent of the film. While I had a really good time watching and learning from the documentary, there were a few things that missed the mark. In an attempt to juggle introspective and objective perspectives, the documentary is structured in such a way that it loses your attention a few times in its fairly free-flow narrative style. I would also have personally liked to see more dimension to Jessea from other sources beyond Yuqi’s narration.
Yuqi’s personal knowledge and understanding of Jessea, and its impact on the overall structure and feeling of the documentary come across as very sincere. She talks about how her and Jessea, over five years during the making of the documentary, became a lot more than a filmmaker and their subject; their bond transcended into a deep familiarity and friendship, which brought forth their rawest selves and their suppressed need for genuine human connection.
The documentary succeeds in walking the thin line between being an exposition of championship freediving whilst sensitively highlighting the aspect of humanity and emotional need that drives people to find an outlet in sports and other hobbies. It was an evocatively stirring and inspiring watch, an ode to the free spirit of human consciousness and limit. A quote from Jessea that echoes her journey from supression to transformation led me to reflect on my own relationship with change and overcoming trauma; she said, “There is no fear that cannot be rewired.”
