My Octopus Teacher is nominated for Best Documentary at the 93rd Academy Awards. Winners will be announced on Sunday, April 25.

Craig Foster, a filmmaker suffering from burnout and depression, seeks a restorative career break at his childhood home on the shores of South Africa. While freediving the Great African Seaforest, he encounters an octopus. As her beauty reignites his interest in life, a curiously intimate relationship unfolds. He dives with her every day for a year, no matter the tempestuous seas, capturing most of her 18-month life on film. She becomes Craig’s teacher, erasing the line between humanity and nature and reconnecting him to the world.

"If you gain the trust of that animal over a period of months, it will actually ignore you to a certain degree and carry on with its normal life, and allow you to step inside its secret world," Foster told CNN shortly after the film’s release. "The octopus showed me many behaviors that were completely new to science because this animal trusted me."

The unusual feat of capturing most of an animal’s life on camera immerses viewers in the Seaforest, giving them a rare opportunity to see love and death in the natural world on display

“She taught him all sorts of things that he was desperately trying to understand,” director Pippa Ehrlich tells Radio New Zealand, “about acceptance and trust, about where we fit in the natural world and I think one of the biggest things that he learnt was that there are really no ‘others’, because every creature that lives on Earth is relatable to us on some level.”

The 93-minute film is a decade in the making, from the time Craig began diving to its September 2020 release on Netflix. Ellen Widenmith is the executive producer, Pippa Ehrlich and James Reed co-directed the film, and Roger Horrocks directed cinematography. Tom Foster, Craig Foster’s son, captured the film’s drone footage. Horrocks and Craig Foster previously collaborated on footage in the same location used in episode five of the BBC’s Blue Planet II. Dr. Jannes Landschoff and ‘octopus psychologist’ Professor Jennifer Mather were scientific consultants. The other Best Documentary nominees are Collective, Crip Camp, The Mole Agent and Time.

My Octopus Teacher has already garnered fifteen other award nominations and seven wins, including best cinematography at the Critics' Choice Documentary Awards and best documentary feature at the Houston Film Critics Society Awards.

The film is backed, in part, by the nonprofit Sea Change Project. Launched by Craig Foster in partnership with Ross Frylinck, it aims to protect the Great African Seaforest, where the documentary was filmed. Kelp forests cover about 25 percent of the world’s coastline, and studies over the last 20 to 50 years have documented more than 60 percent of kelp forests are decreasing in size, with only five percent of forests expanding. Foster and Frylinkck have also written and photographed a book about the forest, Sea Change. Over the years immersed in the Atlantic, Foster has also discovered several new species, including Heteromysis Fosteri, a shrimp named after him.