Film Work
Diving Into The Darkness is a 2024 documentary feature film that tells the story of Canadian cave diving icon Jill Heinerth, and the nail-biting challenges and risks she’s faced to go where no man or woman has gone before.
Diving Into The Darkness won the Best Documentary Award at the Academy Award-qualifying Santa Barbara International Film Festival in 2024, as well as the inaugral Explorers Achievement Award at the Anchorage International Film Festival. With soldout screenings across California, Canada, England, Dubai and Australia, it still holds the spot as IMDB’s highest-rated diving-themed documentary feature film of all time. During the height of principal photography, Nays set a new filmmaking precedent by becoming the first-ever film director certified to cave dive on a rebreather. This enabled him to dive and work alongside the world’s best technical divers, deep into underwater caves inaccessible to recreational divers and Hollywood film crews.
Descent is a 2020 documentary feature film that tells the story of Dutch ice freediver Kiki Bosch, who dives in the world’s coldest waters without a wetsuit as therapy for the trauma of sexual assault, and to inspire others. Shot in England, Iceland, New Zealand and Australia, and featuring unseen ice-diving footage from Greenland, Finland and Switzerland, the film premiered at the Sydney Film Festival, where it won the 2020 Documentary Australia Foundation Award for Best Australian Documentary, along with $10,000 of prize money and Academy Award eligibility.
Descent was then distributed by CAT&Docs and Madman Entertainment, resulting in not only a further dozen international film festival selections, but also the film being picked up by Amazon Prime ANZ, Vimeo UK, DocPlay and Garage Entertainment.
