1,2,3…JUMP!

Whether you know nothing, a little bit, or your knowledge runs deep, Vessel is working on launching this extreme sport into the spotlight.

For much of last summer, we traveled across the US – stopping in Maine, Vermont, Massachusetts, Alabama, and Nevada – to shoot JUMP, a documentary film that follows a group of women as they navigate a transformative period of their lives while sharing a common freedom of expression: high diving.

It is a story about community, grit, and perseverance. It’s about finding meaning in relationships despite the adversity of societal stigmas, dealing with gender inequality, body image, and injuries. It’s a story of pursuing your dreams at all costs…from any height.

Without revealing any spoilers, we can say that JUMP is way more than a super reel of cliff diving. The women at the heart of this story open the proverbial doors on a culture that is as diverse and jagged as the cliff edges they jump off of. Their passion for diving takes them all over the world, from Russia to Seaworld and beyond, and takes us into the Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series, Cirque du Soleil in Las Vegas, Cliff Cruise in Arizona (an annual freestyle event), and some pretty wild parties in between.

It was actually at a party (albeit a tame, family holiday party) where we first heard about freestyle cliff jumping and the independent spirits whom the sport attracts. We started following divers on instagram and quickly realized that this was a much larger community than we had imagined. From the freestylers, to competitive cliff diving, to theatrical show diving. You start to see how interconnected, or rather united the culture really is. Whether that’s because they worked on cruise ships together or chased the same jumps at the same time. But with everything rescheduled for 2020, the pandemic changed the landscape. However, as is often the case with documentary film, unforeseen challenges end up driving the narrative, or at least impacting a storyline or two. We thought it was important to continue shooting during the pandemic and capture how the global event was effecting this unique subculture.

The dedication and passion we saw from these divers was inspiring, not to mention incredibly motivating to watch these women chase their dreams at any cost. While production for JUMP is still ongoing, we can’t wait to share this story with a wider audience one day.

We’ll continue to share updates here!