Fight for Life — The Neil Moss Story

The best documentary I've seen on the Neil Moss incident, a horrible caving tragedy that occurred about 2/3 of a mile into the earth under Derbyshire, England in 1959, and the heroic but futile rescue effort. As is my habit with caving accident documentaries, which tend to describe particularly awful and affecting occurrences, I prefer not to go into further detail here.

The Moss incident spurred a worldwide reconsideration of the dangers of caving and the role of caving rescue workers. This reknowned short (1 hr) but intense documentary reconstructs the timeline, from before the accident through the aftermath, by interviewing still-living people who were members of the caving party and rescue efforts. It's really kind of a paragon of documentarian filmmaking: non-sensationalistic, non-judgmental, thoroughly investigative and complete, thoughtful about its subject, and seeming more than anything to want to simply inform—more journalism than filmmaking.

Documentarian and conservationist David Webb apparently has quite a few films under his belt. On the strength of this, I'd be interested in seeing more of his work.

This film is available to watch for free on YouTube at https://youtu.be/FI6lfcn3Y0c?si=Em-IV01DEZsXN1v8 but be forewarned: though the film is dry and journalistic, the event depicted was very intense and, to me, having had my own very brief experience with subterranean claustrophobia, viscerally disturbing, enough so that I would warn anyone sensitive to such things away from watching or even reading about it.


See all movie reviews...

Comments

No comments yet. Why don’t you start the discussion?

Leave a Reply