Located about 16 km from the city of Cape Town, algae forests became famous with the Academy Award-winning documentary, 'My Octopus Teacher', which was filmed outdoors. Foster lives right by the waters of False Bay, where he took his camera and recorded the beautiful scenes we see in My Octopus Teacher. As he explained in the film, his family “had this small wooden bungalow, literally below the high water mark. During the storms, Foster recalled that the ocean would “break down the doors and fill the bottom of the house.
Cape Point in Western Cape, near False Bay, where My Octopus Teacher was filmed. It follows an unusual friendship between filmmaker Craig Foster and a common octopus in a South African algae forest in False Bay, South Africa, near Cape Town. My Octopus Teacher shows some of the incredible marine life in the waters of False Bay, such as crabs, brittle stars and pajama sharks, which live in the lush seaweed forest. The gong for Best Documentary Feature Film for My Octopus Teacher at this year's Academy Awards has been seen by many critics as the kind of underprivileged story Oscar loves.
In an attack against her, the octopus loses an arm and retreats to its den to recover, slowly regenerating the arm for three months. Foster and Horrocks had previously worked together on several documents, including Discovery's Into the Dragon's Lair, about papyrus caves in Botswana, and notably joined together in an octopus sequence for BBC's Blue Planet II. An immersive portrait of human-animal understanding, brimming with danger, drama and devastating emotions, My Octopus Teacher grabs you with its eight arms and changes its camouflage showing you colors and textures you've never seen before. The result is a collection of images that show some truly incredible views, from schools of colorful fish, to dense and undulating masses of algae, to a confrontation between an octopus and a crab.
Critically acclaimed, My Octopus Teacher made history at the Oscars on April 26, becoming the first South African film to win an Oscar for Best Documentary. He began to document his experiences and, over time, met a curious young octopus that caught his attention. In the Oscar-nominated documentary My Octopus Teacher, filmmaker Craig Foster explores the remarkable relationship he forms with an octopus while free diving in an underwater seaweed forest in False Bay, South Africa. Craig mentioned the behavior of the octopus, where it hides in shells and protects itself from sharks.
Foster describes the effect of this mentoring relationship that the octopus provided him, teaching him a lesson on the fragility of life and the connection of humanity to nature. It followed one through its one-year lifecycle, capturing stunning images of the octopus feeding on shrimp and escaping from the jaws of pajama sharks. My Octopus Teacher shows viewers that meaningful commitments to the natural world can happen right outside their door. My Octopus Teacher follows documentary filmmaker Craig Foster as he dives into the ocean near his home on the south coast of the Cape Peninsula to observe, document, touch and be touched by a common octopus (Octopus vulgaris).
