with Craig Foster.

Craig Foster, a South African documentary filmmaker, exhausted from his work, decides to dive in the kelp forest – filled waters of the ocean off the Western Cape. Even though the water is very cold, he dives without a wet suit, and though it takes him over a year, he eventually adjusts to the temperature. He also does not take any scuba or diving gear, but relies on his own lungs to swim through these waters. What he finds there is the subject of the movie. A specific octopus he is interested in as he repeatedly observes her on his dives returns her interest in him.

The photography establishes the intimacy of the relationship that forms. There are images and shots that startle the viewer with their beauty. Can a man and an animal understand each other when their species are so different?

One might wonder how these shots are obtained. Besides Craig, there is a photography director, who also is involved. But Craig is holding the camera most of the time. He has the patience to establish a safe environment for the octopus to reveal her true nature.

At one point as she is chased by a pyjama shark, the octopus suddenly disappears under a layer of shells, using the ruse of this deeply textured sealife to escape.

Eventually the boundaries between human and animal dissolve. The octopus lies on Craig’s chest, and we see the scale difference between the two creatures. The human is ten times the size of the cephalopod.

The octopus teaches Craig many things. As he states in an interview in VOA, “She taught me humility. She taught me compassion. She opened my mind to just how precious wild creatures are and how complex.”

We witness the octopus surviving the loss of a limb. Eat or be eaten is the rule of the wild. Anthropomorphising the animal is inevitable for Foster. Scenes of predators and prey, with the pyjama shark always nearing our heroine have the drama and suspense of an action movie.

In the end, Foster passes on his passion for nature to his son, ensuring a generation to come will care for nature as he does.