My Octopus Teacher
A documentary review
I don’t normally watch documentaries, but I was intrigued by the title, I mean who wouldn’t be, right? And of course, with all the furor it has garnered with the many awards it had accumulated culminating in the Oscar last month, it made me curious.
The film ‘My Octopus Teacher’ is directed by Pippa Ehrlich and James Reed. The narrative starts with a small insight into filmmaker Craig Foster’s struggles with his current pace of life and the impact it’s having on his mental health and personal life. Knowing that he needs to break away from the world for a time to reset, he sets off to his family’s cabin by the sea in the cape of storms, South Africa. There he rekindles the excitement he had in his youth for diving in the Kelp forest. To me its hard to even imagine diving on a coast that has such gusty winds and cold turbulent water. Foster even describes it as ‘one of the wildest, most scary places to swim on the planet’. The grey overcast clouds, sharp outcropping of rock and winds just adds to the dramatic backdrop which hides this complete other world below it. Instead of stepping through the wardrobe into Narnia, he steps through a film of water, deep diving into still blue green, and weaves through ropes of Kelp reaching up to the sky. There he encounters a lone Octopus behaving in the most intriguing manner and so his curiosity is peaked. He…
