An EDA Movie Screening

DAVE NOT COMING BACK

We held our third EDA Movie Screening social event on the 4th of August to show Dave Not Coming Back, an extraordinary and tragic story that deserved to be told. A big thank you to Jonah Malak and Don Shirley for the rights to screen it, and to Deep Dive Dubai for continually supporting EDA and hosting our quarterly screenings.

SYNOPSIS

Two high level scuba-divers and long-time friends, Don and Dave, broke a world record for depth in the Boesmansgat cave in South Africa. It would take them 15 minutes to reach the bottom, but 12 hours to surface. Having reached the bottom, against all odds, they find a body. They decide to come back and retrieve it.

AN INTERVIEW FROM LRM ONLINE 2020

Jonah Malak first heard about the story in 2012 – 7 years after the event. He got in contact with Don Shirley in 2014 to start telling this story.

In his own words, Jonah explains what he wants the audience to take away from his film, “There is a cathartic value to watching a tragedy on screen because it bounces back to your own life. You see this happening and it makes you think of your own mortality, your own fragility, and maybe the mitigating risks is beyond what we are used to as normal urban human beings. For example, Don breathing for hours and hours on his own and saying there is no one else who can do that for us. We can connect to that. If you have someone who is sick, in a terminal phase of cancer for example, the situation is exactly the same, the emotions are exactly the same, the tragic aspect of it, that there is nothing anyone else can do but to live in the moment, moment by moment, until it ends. These kinds of strong emotions have a cathartic value, that I hope will stick with the audience once they get out of the movie. Independent of the diver, and I know divers will take even more specific stuff to their sport and how they mitigate risk and think about their families, and think about diving.”

Don explains his thoughts, “I think the story has been told correctly, and everything that was said there was exactly spot on. And I think, that the way this story has been told, it doesn’t necessarily need to be about diving. People may think,oh I’m not going to go to this film because it’s a diving film, but you don’t even feel you’re in the water when you watch it because it’s so true to life and it can be applied to any situation I believe. I’ve given talks on this film almost in a motivational aspect, because what it boils down to is you need to do what you need to do now, and that’s all you can do. And if you decide that you can no longer do it, then that is correct. You can’t do it. One of the sayings that I have now, ‘believe you can, believe you can’t’, either way, you’re right. My saying is ‘believe you can’, because you can and at no time did I personally think that I wouldn’t come out. And when the book was being written, I suddenly realised that’s exactly how I was thinking. And this film I believe puts that across well. So anyone that watches this and listens to the story can think of what needs to be done, and this is what I’m going to do. I believe that you could take water out of this story and it would really be a magic story in itself.”

WANT TO JOIN OUR EVENTS?

Our social event and online EDA Movie Screenings are only accessible to EDA members. The screenings have limited spots available. Registration to join them is necessary in order to join the guest list to our social event, or to receive the special link to view the films online.

You can register for EDA membership or renew it via our website here: www.emiratesdiving.com/membership-form