The documentary filmmaker Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi lives in fear of not telling a complete story. What if there is another angle to explore? More footage to uncover? Is her exploration of a topic ever really complete? Those feelings were occupying large swaths of her brain back in May when she was finally able to travel to Thailand.
Vasarhelyi, 42, and her husband, Jimmy Chin, 47, are best known for their Oscar-winning, death-defying climbing documentary, “Free Solo.” The duo had already spent three years painstakingly turning over every piece of video available to them for their new film: “The Rescue,” which opens Oct. 8 in theaters. It tracks the 2018 global effort to retrieve 12 young soccer players and their coach trapped in the flooded Tham Luang cave in Chiang Rai Province, Thailand. The filmmakers had scoured international news feeds and local Thai footage, often piecing together scenes from a slew of disparate sources. What they couldn’t find, she and Chin and the British divers who led the rescue operation recreated in a tank in Pinewood Studios in Britain.
They had essentially completed their movie. It was moving and harrowing, yet it still nagged at Vasarhelyi. It was missing the scope of the operation and some smaller, more intimate moments that underscored the gravity of the situation. But those moments were in the hands of the Thai Navy Seals, and after two years of negotiations, no amount of effort on Vasarhelyi’s part had convinced the military to share the footage with her.
Until May. When Vasarhelyi, fully vaccinated and willing to endure a two-week quarantine in Thailand, made the trek to Phuket to meet with Rear Adm. Arpakorn Youkongkaew, a Royal Thai Navy Seal commander, and his wife, Sasivimon Youkongkaew, a former television journalist who had the instinct to give the Seals cameras at the beginning of what would become an 18-day rescue operation.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/06/business/media/thai-cave-rescue-documentary.html
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