My Octopus Teacher: A Luminous Inter-Species Encounter

Painlevé gives us an account of an octopus that is grotesque, repulsive in its radical difference from us. In their collaboration with Foster, the directors of My Octopus Teacher, Pippa Ehrlich and James Reed, have elicited our fascination with this combination of likeness and difference in a different register. Deploying all of the mesmerising aesthetic resources of underwater cinematography, their film evokes the mnemonic traces we carry deep in our own bodies' rhythms of our early development afloat in a watery sac. This evokes a much more profound sense of connection with the octopus and awakens in viewers an appreciation of the complex ecosystem of the South African kelp forest she inhabits. Harvesting this awareness has been essential to their development of the Sea Change Project, a collective endeavour to protect this endangered environment, 'the only forest of giant bamboo kelp on our planet', which they describe as 'vastly richer than the Great Barrier Reef' in its endemic species. They describe their goal in this project to create 'a movement of emotional ecology, where people feel a meaningful connection to wild places and the animals that live in them'.