Drowning remains one of the most under-discussed causes of preventable death worldwide, and disproportionately affects children, low-income communities and those with limited access to swimming lessons.
Ed Accura and SpaceDNA Studios are proud to announce that their upcoming eye-opening documentary, No Lifeguard, will be free to watch on YouTube from 12 am on July 23rd, two days ahead of World Drowning Prevention Day on July 25th.
Producer Ed Accura (Blacks Can’t Swim, Blacks Can’t Swim: The Sequel, Blacks Can’t Swim: REWIND, Changing The Narrative) didn’t learn to swim until adulthood.That single fact, and the unease it left behind, is the spark for No Lifeguard. This new feature documentary that turns one man’s late, hard-won relationship with water into a wider story about who actually keeps us safe when we get in. The film is directed by Mysterex and filmed across Ghana, Sri Lanka and London.
It is a deceptively simple thought, delivered with real warmth. A lifeguard, the film argues, shouldn’t be one person in red and yellow watching from a chair. It should be all of us, starting with ourselves. No Lifeguard builds that argument through testimony rather than statistics, travelling to two of the regions hit hardest by drowning anywhere in the world
Accura – a musician and filmmaker before he was ever an advocate – frames the whole film through his own experience of disengagement from swimming, and what changed when he finally learned. That honesty is prominent in Accra and Colombo, where the documentary meets people for whom the absence of a lifeguard isn’t a philosophical question, but daily reality. Ghana and Sri Lanka are among the countries with the highest drowning rates in the world. The film finds communities who have had to build their own informal safety nets simply because the formal ones rarely reach them.
Back in London, the film’s most pointed conversation unfolds between Accura and Danielle Obe (both pictured above), co-founder alongside him of the Black Swimming Association, a charity working to close the long-documented gap in swimming access and water confidence within Black British communities. Their exchange grounds the film’s central idea in a conversation about who has historically been left out of water safety messaging altogether, and why that has to change.
Producer Ed Accura says; “This film is not about blame. It is about prevention. It is about helping people understand that their first safety decision happens before they enter the water. Lifeguards are vital, but none of us should outsource our safety completely to someone else. We all have an important role to play.”
The documentary is bookended by two original songs – the title track and the newly written 1 Life.
No Lifeguard will be available to watch free
on YouTube at 12 am on July 23rd
