What I Learned From that Octopus
On the surface (ha), My Octopus Teacher is your typical man meets mollusk love story. But, in terms of film language (below the surface, as it were), there are some very interesting things going on: for starters, it’s almost 95% b-roll with voice-over. The story is told - and we’ll get into the filmmaking aspects of that later - by Craig Foster, a filmmaker*, whose year-long relationship with an octopus in the wild is, basically, the whole story. * It’s interesting that he’s credited neither as a director (Pippa Ehrlich & James Reed) nor a writer (same) even though his recounting of his personal experience is the only narration/voice in…