'My Octopus Teacher'

I watched My Octopus Teacher in the grueling, stressful weeks leading up to the Presidential election. Democracy seemed (and still seems) at stake. A plague was rampaging. And this humble film was a salve, so much so that I can see myself returning to it in other moments of crisis.

Craig Foster needed a salve of his own. The main human character in the film, he begins free diving in the ocean near his house on the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa. A nature filmmaker by trade, he starts documenting his daily dives as a way to overcome burnout in his professional life. The sea life is stunning - sharks, fish, coral, a tendril-like kelp forest that shapes the underwater seascape.

This is the stuff of David Attenborough until Foster runs in to an octopus, quite literally reaches out and begins to develop a relationship with the creature day by day by day.

For most of us, an octopus is a curiosity or a mezze plate or both. But at least among the non-mammal cohort, they seem the most human in traits. Their whole physical being is devoted to feeling and thinking. Foster finds a kindred spirit in this octopus off of the edge of the Cape of Good Hope, and those traits and his unbelievable footage makes it easy to understand why.

As much as My Octopus Teacher is a story about unlikely connection, it is also about the inexorability of nature and life itself. Human or beast or remarkably intelligent, tentacled sea creature, our existences and all of our connections are fragile and incomprehensibly fleeting.

This film brought me joy and wonder and a smile and melancholy. It left me thinking of Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot. For all of the momentous things we have experienced this year, it is worth remembering that all of human history has been filled with similarly momentous events, and that human history and even life on this planet is a blip in the context of the universe. Any film that can leave you on that kind of philosophical plane is one with great power indeed.