Julie Gautier

Julie Gautier is a French underwater storyteller who uses freediving to choreograph and film human movement in the ocean without conventional scuba apparatus. Born on Réunion Island on 19 November 1979, she grew up in a family shaped by both dance and the sea. She learned dance before pursuing freediving, eventually setting two French records in constant-weight apnea. The discipline gave her breath control, pressure awareness, and underwater mobility that later became tools for filmmaking rather than competitive ends in themselves.

After leaving elite competition, Gautier taught herself underwater cinematography. She often works on a single breath, allowing her body and camera to move with a freediving performer without bubbles, heavy equipment, or an operator detached from the physical environment. That method makes filming itself a partnered movement practice. Her early film *Free Fall* (2010), featuring freediver Guillaume Néry descending into Dean's Blue Hole, became an international online success. *Narcose* (2013) explored the altered perceptions associated with deep diving. Gautier later directed underwater material for Beyoncé's "Runnin' (Lose It All)" in 2015, bringing her visual language to a global music-video audience.

In *Ama* (2018), Gautier moved in front of the camera as dancer and performer. Made for International Women's Day and choreographed with Ophélie Longuet, the solo uses a flooded interior, shifting buoyancy, and controlled breath to express pressure, suspension, collapse, and resistance. Gautier and Néry continued the oceanic film practice with *One Breath Around the World* (2019), filmed across multiple submerged environments. Her broader work joins art, environmental attention, and embodied knowledge. Rather than treating underwater movement as a novelty effect, she has developed a repeatable cinematic language grounded in the physics and ethics of entering another environment.