My Octopus Teacher won the Best Documentary Feature at the 2021 Academy Awards. It chronicles a remarkable experience of a diver in South Africa visiting a kelp forest, specifically an octopus, every day for a year. It’s a Netflix original film, directed by Pippa Ehrlich and James Reed. The film was 10 years in the making.
Craig Foster is a wildlife filmmaker who braves 48-degree ocean temperatures and rough currents in a remote location with no wetsuit or scuba gear. He is in the midst of an unexplained mid-life crisis and re-visiting the tide pools he frequented as a child when he discovers the octopus. He is struck by its camouflage techniques and begins watching it on its daily activities. After weeks of keeping his distance, the octopus seems to grow comfortable with having him around. It also reaches out to him and nuzzles his chest. It’s impossible to know what this “relationship” means to the octopus. Foster raises this same question and despite an obsessive connection with the creature, he resists the pressure to intervene in the natural process and help it (with one exception).
The highlights of the movie are the octopus itself and the kelp forest. The adaptive behavior of the octopus is amazing: covering itself with shells to hide, changing its shapes, sizes, and colors, walking on two arms on the bottom, riding on the back of a shark to escape it, and regenerating body parts. The underwater camerawork of Roger Horrocks and Foster to capture all this on film, plus the patience and technique required, is quite an achievement.
The underwater cinemaphotography of the kelp forest is beautiful and brings it to life. For alive it is. From seals and sharks, to crabs and crazy big starfish, to the tiniest of fish, the kelp provides a thriving habitat. This portrayal of a healthy ocean environment was hopeful and promising. We hear a lot about overfishing, climate change, bleached coral, and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. It’s good to know places like this still exist along with their fascinating inhabitants, such as this octopus. They never did name her.
D² Rating ◼◼◼◼☐
What class of species is the octopus?
Answer: Cephalopoda