#My teacher the octopus series#
#My teacher the octopus free#

READ MORE Ghanaian film 'Da Yie' reminds us to hold onto that innocence in childhood In other parts of the world, kelp forests are disappearing.” In South Africa, we are very fortunate that the Great African Sea Forest is in relatively good shape. “It’s an incredibly beautiful, three-dimensional environment where you literally feel like you’re flying through an actual forest. “I started free-diving in the kelp forest when I was living in Cape Town in my early 20s,” Pippa says. The directors claim to be behind an “emotional ecology” movement meant to re-connect people with nature. The film’s at times human-centric point of view and overly feel-good quality are all part of a strategy to raise awareness. Sea Change aims to make the Great African Sea Forest a “global icon”. Working with Netflix was “an amazing experience”, Pippa says, even though the greater part of the documentary was produced by the Sea Change Project, a nonprofit run by Pippa, Craig, Roger and several other friends.

As of 1 March, the programme had attracted the interest of 425 applicants. The selected screenwriters will receive a $2,000 stipend per month for three months to cover their expenses as they develop their projects, which Netflix could pick up for production as an African original.

#My teacher the octopus series#

Together, they are funding Episodic Lab, a residency programme that is set to offer six screenwriters from Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa the chance to write and pitch a series to Netflix. Netflix has partnered with the Johannesburg-based Realness Institute in a bid to stimulate the production of local content. READ MORE Israeli film ‘White Eye’ highlights the scapegoating of African migrants She lets me watch her hunt and so much more.’ Roger showed up in Cape Town with his huge Red Dragon camera and managed to capture some of the octopus’s incredible natural behaviours.” “But he grew really enthusiastic after his mind-boggling experience with the octopus, so he called Roger and told him, ‘You have to come see what this octopus can do. “Craig had spent a lot of time shooting on his own with a small hand-held camera,” Pippa says. With Roger on board, the project took on the magnitude of a hit documentary. On top of the material Craig filmed on his own, he worked with his friend Roger Horrocks, an ace underwater cameraman whose cinematographic credits include the BBC-produced documentary Blue Planet II and Netflix’s Our Planet, to shoot more footage. It was hardly overkill to have two directors work on a film that had been shot over eight years and accumulated 3,000 hours of footage.

#My teacher the octopus free#

Pippa, who, like Craig, is a Cape Town-based free diver, got involved in the project in 2017, with James Reed following suit one year later. He knew that his story with the octopus was very powerful.” Everywhere he goes, he always has his camera by his side because that’s how he understands the world and what he loves to do. “He’s just this naturalist who loves capturing his experiences with nature. “In the beginning, Craig had no intention of turning his footage into a documentary,” says Pippa Ehrlich, the film’s co-director.

He observed the octopus with fascination, eventually resolving to return every day so that he could spend time with the creature and document her short life. In 2015, while free-diving in the vast Great African Sea Forest, known for its kelp forests housing diverse ecosystems, he came across an octopus that changed his life. Suffering from burnout and depression, Craig went diving every day – sans wetsuit or an oxygen tank – in the freezing, turbulent Atlantic waters. But the strange thing is, as you get closer to them, you realise that we’re very similar in a lot of ways,” narrates Craig Foster, in the opening of the film. “A lot of people say an octopus is like an alien. READ MORE Netflix sets its sights on Francophone Africa