My Octopus Teacher

Over one year, filmmaker Craig Foster visited the same octopus every single day, documenting her entire life in the freezing kelp forests of South Africa.

Burned out from years of nature filmmaking, Foster had returned to the waters where he grew up, diving daily without wetsuit or oxygen tank. During one dive, he encountered a curious female octopus. As weeks passed, she began to trust him, playing with him and revealing behaviors rarely witnessed—armoring herself with shells and stones, hunting with camouflage, navigating predators.

This Oscar-winning film is meditative and slow, focused less on narrative than on introspection about our relationship with nature and what we can learn from careful observation.