By studying her actions and observing her learn, play and recover from injury, he applied lessons to his own life - even knitting together a fractured relationship with his son. It was only several years in that the strange behavior of a small speckled octopus sparked his curiosity, and kept his attention for the duration of her short life. And that becomes your underwater home, especially if you’re visiting it every day.” And then you’re in this golden forest, this liquid environment that hasn’t any gravity. It fills your brain with these feel-good chemicals. The experience has been transformative, he says. Braving frigid waters and epic storms, Foster has rigidly kept that commitment. Rather than go to the desert, he turned to the sea at his front door, and vowed to himself to free-dive every single day for ten years. “If I could spend every day in a wild environment, how well could I get to know it? Could I learn to read tracks like the hunters in the Kalahari? Could I predict animals’ behavior?”Īerial view of Craig Foster in the Great African Sea Forest. “I desperately wanted to have that feeling,” he says. He recalled the San hunters’ deep immersion in nature and realized that was what was missing in his life. He felt like he had lost his connection to the world around him, he says, and even to his own family. She opened my mind to just how complex and precious wild creatures are.”Ĭelebrated for his groundbreaking 2000 film, The Great Dance, about the San bush-hunters of the Kalahari desert, Foster found himself in 2011 burnt out and physically wrecked by the stress of trying to survive as a nature documentary filmmaker. “She taught me humility,” he says, while grazing on a post-dive snack of wholegrain toast with butter. He also documents his own efforts to understand her world and how that quest led to emotional and intellectual growth. For more than a year Foster follows her on daily dives as she hunts for prey and evades her predators with an uncanny ingenuity that calls into question human assumptions of superior intelligence.īut Foster is no detached observer. My Octopus Teacher tells the story of the unusual bond between Foster and a wild octopus he encounters while freediving. It’s as if, piece by piece, he is trying to bring the ocean into his living room.
My octopus teacher skin#
The skin of a small shark wraps around a driftwood pillar. Stacks of abalone shells the size of dinner plates teeter in a corner. Shells and sea glass colonize the flat surfaces.
“Going there feels like going home.”įoster’s land-based home is laden with treasures brought back from his own hunting expeditions. “When an animal has such an influence on you… you can’t help but love the environment that made her,” he says, gazing down at her kelp-forest cove from the picture window of his cliffside bungalow. The Octopus is long gone-octopuses rarely survive more than 18 months in the wild-but her co-star and “student,” filmmaker Craig Foster, still visits her former home in daily dives that are as much about pilgrimage as they are about science. Her onetime den lies a couple of dozen feet off the coast of Cape Town suburb Simon’s Town. The dense kelp forest off the southern tip of South Africa is home to an unparalleled diversity of sea animals including sharks, rays, and, once upon a time, a common octopus that has just had an uncommon run as the star of the new Netflix documentary, My Octopus Teacher.
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