My Octopus Teacher
A filmmaker forges an unusual friendship with an octopus living in a South African kelp forest
Metadata
| Director | Pippa Ehrlich, James Reed |
| Year | 2020 |
| Writer | Pippa Ehrlich, James Reed |
| Stars | Craig Foster, Tom Foster |
The Movie in 3 Sentences
My Octopus Teacher follows filmmaker Craig Foster as he develops an unusual bond with a wild octopus in a South African kelp forest. Through repeated dives, he watches her hunt, hide, improvise, escape predators, and navigate a life that is both incredibly intelligent and incredibly brief. What begins as nature observation gradually becomes a quiet story about attention, connection, and finding your way back to the world.
At the time, I felt completely disconnected from everything and had probably consumed far too much post-apocalyptic content, so I wanted something that might actually warm my heart. This turned out to be exactly that. Octopuses are already extraordinary creatures—their biology is bizarre, their intelligence is astonishing, and they seem capable of problem-solving, curiosity, play, and forms of recognition that feel almost eerily familiar.
What makes that even more remarkable is how short their lives are and how solitary they tend to be. They don’t have decades to learn, and they don’t grow up inside the kind of social structures we usually associate with intelligent animals. And yet they can adapt, strategize, use their environment creatively, and respond to the world with an incredible amount of flexibility.
I was genuinely surprised by how much personality this particular octopus seemed to have. The film made it very easy to feel empathy for a creature that looks almost completely alien compared with the animals we usually form emotional bonds with, like dogs or cats. By the end, she no longer felt alien at all.
That was probably what moved me most: the realization that something can be radically different from us and still feel vivid, intelligent, vulnerable, and deeply alive.