The Rescue

The Rescue (2021) is a documentary you can watch online on iFILM, telling the story that gripped the world in the summer of 2018: twelve boys and their football coach trapped deep inside a flooded cave in northern Thailand, with no way out. They survived more than two weeks in the dark several kilometres from the entrance.

Directors Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi — who made Free Solo — built the film from exceptional archival footage, rescue communications and first-hand testimony. British cave divers Rick Stanton and John Volanthen reached passages military divers couldn't navigate. The extraction itself required a military anaesthesiologist, Dr Richard Harris, to sedate each child and guide them through submerged tunnels in near-zero visibility.

Chin and Vasarhelyi resist the urge to make it feel like a pre-scripted triumph. The people who were there carry the film — and the weight of the one death that happened along the way. Stream The Rescue online on iFILM.