Craig Foster appears in only one film we have reviewed, and he is the whole of it: a man in a dark room telling us what an octopus felt. The footage he shot is patient and close. The telling is where we part company.
Fi1m perspective
He sits facing the camera in a dark room and talks quietly, and then he talks over the pictures too. That is Craig Foster's screen presence, and in My Octopus Teacher (2020) it is almost the only one there is. He is subject, producer and cinematographer, and the underwater footage of a cold kelp forest off the tip of South Africa is largely his: an octopus hiding on the sea floor, watched at close quarters for a year. He is a likeable man on screen, unhurried and plainly sincere, and he never once stops explaining.
He began directing nature documentaries in the early 2000s, with The Great Dance: A Hunter's Story (2000) and later My Hunter's Heart (2010), and while making them he learned tracking from San people of the Kalahari. In 2012 he co-founded the Sea Change Project to protect South Africa's kelp forests. We have not reviewed the earlier films and will not judge them here, but they explain the man who turns up in the water: a filmmaker who has spent two decades watching animals and has now decided the subject is himself.
The watching is what works. He went into that water every day, without a wetsuit's worth of comfort, and the patience shows in every shot of her. We were drawn in by the first sight of her on the sea floor and stayed drawn in for as long as the camera simply looked. Then Foster tells us she is curious, that she is playing, that she trusts him, that she is teaching him something about being alive, and Kevin Smuts's piano climbs to agree with him, and we found ourselves pulling back each time. There is no biologist in the film and no second voice. Pippa Ehrlich and James Reed, who direct, give him the last word on everything, and a narrator who knows only what he has seen is both the film's strength and its limit.
He has said of the octopus that "she was teaching me to become sensitised to the other." We believe he believes it. The film shows us a man being changed and asks us to take the animal's part in it on trust, and the title promises the reverse. It is still a good film, and the best of it is wordless.
Since then he has written a book, Amphibious Soul (2024), and carried on with the conservation work. We would happily watch him film another animal for another year. We would like someone else to do the talking.
Biography
Craig Foster is a South African documentary filmmaker and naturalist. He co-founded the Sea Change Project in 2012, a nonprofit organisation focused on protecting marine life and raising awareness of the kelp forests in South Africa.
Foster produced and appeared as himself in the 2020 Netflix documentary My Octopus Teacher, directed by Pippa Ehrlich and James Reed. The film follows his daily free dives in the kelp forests of False Bay near Cape Town and his interactions with a wild common octopus. It won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2021 and a BAFTA for Best Documentary.
His earlier work includes directing The Great Dance: A Hunter's Story (2000) and My Hunter's Heart (2010). He is married to Indian environmental journalist and filmmaker Swati Thiyagarajan.
