The first step to telling a story is feeling it, says Mongol-Chinese Canadian filmmaker Yuqi Kang whose desire to shoot a documentary about freediving led to her own training in the sport for 7 Beats Per Minute (Feb. 11 at Capitol 6). That film and Quebec-based animator Véronique Paquette’s short film, Loca (Feb 13 & Feb 15 at Intrepid Theatre), are part of the National Film Board of Canada’s eight features and shorts to be screened at the Victoria Film Festival (Feb. 7 to 16).

“I decided to learn freediving myself…to understand what it takes to dive in the ocean,” Kang adds. “The feelings and the visuals, the emotional and physical journey, [it] would take for somebody to do this.”

Directing rebirth

Kang’s 7 Beats Per Minute follows freediving champion Jessea Lu’s return to freediving at the site of a near-death experience in 2018 when she was unresponsive for four minutes – a story Kang sees as Lu’s rebirth through her confrontation with physical and mental traumas.

“What’s really happening in her life in this chapter is about [being] reborn from that experience, to be opened to another perspective,” Kang says. “I really want the audience to understand who Jessea is.”

The director adds that the choice to place the near-death experience in the middle of the film rather than the beginning was a deliberate one, allowing audiences to see the freediving champion as a regular person with vulnerabilities. Inspired by Lu’s wide-ranging talents – as a professional athlete, a clinical pharmacologist with a PhD and a graduate of Peking University – Kang first reached out to Lu via social media, resulting in a coffee meeting that lasted past midnight.

“What really drew me to the story is that Jessea is a person of colour, a BIPOC female person in North America,” Kang says. “I feel like she represents myself and many other people like [me].”

Five years in the making, the documentary also highlights their growing connection, blurring Kang’s roles as a filmmaker and friend to Jessea. The director hopes that viewers will feel immersed in the world of freediving, appreciating the sport’s peaceful and scary sides, while feeling hopeful that their own traumas can be resolved.

“Jessea pushed me into that very uncomfortable zone to be more vulnerable, to open myself up more to that,” Kang adds. “And it made me overall a much stronger storyteller and filmmaker.”

Dancing with ink

“I wanted to liberate myself in both [tango and animation],” says Paquette of the inspirations behind her first featured film Loca. Named after a widely used Argentine tango song, Paquette’s film portrays a female silhouette swept into a dance of liberating self-discovery – which allowed the creator to dance with ink.

“I had a personal quest to find a good balance between control and freedom,” she adds. “This film is a good meeting between both.”

Having danced the Argentinian tango for over 20 years, Paquette sees it as a multisensory experience of responding to other dancers, the music, the space, and even one’s breath. Seeing dance as a language capable of crossing linguistic barriers, she notes how the tango is about building connections with the present moment – a theme that Loca expands to connecting with oneself.

“You can’t just be there for the other,” says Paquette of the approach to dancing shown in the film. “If you’re not there [yourself], it’s not working.”

Paquette had originally planned to animate the dance scenes by imagining herself dancing tango. After finding the process challenging, she persuaded choreographer friends to pose the different moves, allowing her to capture photos from various angles. Starting with traditional animation, Paquette then used ink and palette knife to personalize the final result, translating these dance moves into what she sees as the two universes of Loca.

“She was not feeling [well] at the beginning,” Paquette says of the film’s narrative. “And at the end, she’s alive with all those experiences in her life.”

Paquette also worked with a musician of the bandoneon, a common instrument in tango music, adding what she calls “the breath of the film.” She hopes that audiences will experience Loca as “a good breath” and feel inspired to move to their own intuitions.

“I had good comments from tango dancers about the general feeling and the experience of music in the medium,” she adds. “It’s started a lot of really good discussion about connection [and] about music.”

For more information, see: www.victoriafilmfestival.com