Diving Deep: The Life and Times of Mike deGruy (deGruy, 2018): USA

Reviewed by Matheus Clorado. Viewed at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival 2019.

Diving Deep follows the journey along the years of environmentalist, diver and filmmaker Mike deGruy, and reveals his beautiful mission of self-discovery and ocean exploration. The movie premiered at the opening night of the 2019 Santa Barbara International Film Festival to a full Arlington Theater.

Directed by his wife Mimi Armstrong deGruy, who found the archived footage to be a way to keep her husband’s spirit alive during her own process of grief, the audience is certain to be touched by their beautiful love story, connection and shared passion as the movie’s main theme thickens.

Selected from extensive hours of stunning underwater visuals and documented encounters with sharks and other rare marine beings, editor Brent Sumner (Citizen McCaw) executed an impressive job of bringing to surface the essence of what those encounters and risks really meant to Mike and his message.

The message here is crystal clear, yet profound as the ocean they talk about. Diving Deep is a call for understanding something far greater than what we can logically accept. It screams for change in law and politics and, make no mistake, it screams for a change in each heart in the audience.

As seen with Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, in the process of fighting the invasive and destructive actions towards nature, environmentalists often find themselves caught up in bureaucratic and corrupt cage systems. In Diving Deep, that struggle is well portrayed and assisted by many incredible advocates of that subject such as marine biologist Sylvia Earle.

“We’re the aliens,” it’s stated, humans are destroying an immense natural system that it’s barely understood to this day. Billions are spent into sending rockets to space when species are going extinct before we get to name them.

This movie is rich visually, touching and won’t fail at delivering its powerful message.