The Other Shore: The Diana Nyad Story

There is no doubt that Diana Nyad is a woman who, for whatever reason, has incredible willpower, but the people around her depicted here all seem to this viewer to be criminally negligent, both exploiting Nyad’s nuttiness and participating in her own exploitation of the situation – and it does not seem possible to exclude the filmmakers themselves from this judgment. The eventual outcome does little to alter this view. Moreover, the fact that the final swim is barely shown, and that no explanation is given for this absence, raises obvious questions, and it seems that doubts have only increased over time. Finally, while early on it is acknowledged that the same swim was completed by Susie Maroney (but with a shark cage, and I have a vague recollection that there was something a bit strange about her own situation at the time, and that perhaps the people surrounding her, too, were exploiting her for their own ends, though my memory is too hazy to be sure about that), after a while that fact gets dropped and the film continuously states that Nyad would be “the first”. In short, this documentary seems both unethical and deceitful, and in multiple ways, leaving the viewer with the unpleasant feeling of having allowed themselves to go along with something a little bit dirty.