Eighteen years old, alone, surrounded by complete silence and darkness, lost in a cave. SHE BREATHES is a personal, exciting, spiritual, and ultimately uplifting story of the longest rescue in Wind Cave history, told by the woman who was lost and her filmmaker daughter.
In the fall of 1989 Rachel Cox, after having an emotionally devastating fall out with her mother, embarks on a semester long Outdoor Leadership course. While having a challenging time keeping up with the other coursemates, and often being called the “weakest link”, she set off to prove herself capable in the caving portion of the course. Being one of the smaller members and comfortable in dark, damp, small spaces she excelled flying through the tight turns off Wind Cave. Instead of checking her gear on the day of the final, a mock search and rescue, she found herself isolated and lost several hours later. If she had remained lost, her daughter, filmmaker Ivey-Camille Manybeads Tso, would never have been born. SHE BREATHES is a true life adventure film.
Ivey Camille Manybeads Tso is an award-winning queer Navajo filmmaker. She was a fellow with the Firelight Media Documentary Filmmaker Lab, and the 4th World Indigenous Media Lab. She started making films at the age of 9, through the Native youth media project Outta Your Backpack Media. At the age of 13 she made the award-winning fiction film In the Footsteps of Yellow Woman, based in the true story of her great-great-great grandmother Yellow Woman, who lived through the Navajo Long Walk of 1864-1868. The film screened in over 90 film festivals internationally and won 11 awards. Ivey Camille continued to refine her filmmaking craft with a full scholarship to Idyllwild Arts Academy in California. She later returned home to work on films in her community of Navajo Nation. At the age of 19, Ivey Camille began work on Powerlands, her first feature. Powerlands has screened internationally and won several festival awards including the The 2022 Rigoberta Menchú Grand Prize. She is currently at work on her next feature, She Breathes.
