Amateur Divers Talk Themselves Into or Out of Jumping Off a Ten Meter Diving Tower

Amateur divers who answered an online advertisement talk themselves into or out of jumping off a high dive platform in the short documentary “Ten Meter Tower” by Maximilien Van Aertryck and Axel Danielson. The respondents had never jumped from such a height (about 33 feet) before, and knew they were being recorded as they decided whether to jump. The filmmakers said that about 70 percent of participants took the leap.

The film was featured in the 2017 Sundance Film Festival and in the New York Times video series Op-Docs.

Our objective in making this film was something of a psychology experiment: We sought to capture people facing a difficult situation, to make a portrait of humans in doubt. We’ve all seen actors playing doubt in fiction films, but we have few true images of the feeling in documentaries. To make them, we decided to put people in a situation powerful enough not to need any classic narrative framework. A high dive seemed like the perfect scenario.