OSCAR FOR ‘MY OCTOPUS’ TEACHER
CHLOE Zhao made history when she won the best director Oscar at the Academy Awards.
The Chinese filmmaker became the first woman of colour and only the second woman ever to take home the Oscar on Sunday thanks to her work on Nomadland. After paying tribute to her fellow nominees – David Fincher (Mank), Emerald Fennell (Promising Young Woman), Lee Isaac Chung (Minari), and Thomas Vinterberg (Another Round), she thanked everyone who worked on the movie.
She said: “Oh man. Thank you to the Academy, to my brilliant, brilliant fellow nominees. My entire Nomadland company, what a crazy once-in-a-lifetime journey we went on together, thank you so much, I’m so grateful to you.”
Zhao also reflected on a lesson she learnt in childhood that had stayed with her throughout her life.
She said: “When I was growing up in China, my dad and I would play this game and memorise classic poems and texts. We’d recite them together and try to finish each other’s sentences.
“(One said) ‘People at birth are inherently good’ , and that had such impact on me when I was a kid and I still believe in that today. Even though the opposite may seem true, I have always found goodness for the people I met, so this is for anyone who has the faith and the courage to hold out for the goodness in themselves and each other.
“This is for you, you inspire me and keep me going, so thank you.”
| Bang Showbiz
THE recent Oscar win for best documentary film by My Octopus Teacher has laid the foundation for an unprecedented increase in ocean awareness.
The film, which has won more than 20 international awards, including best documentary at the British Academy Film Awards (Bafta) and Producers Guild of America Awards, became the first nature documentary to win an Academy Award since The Cove in 2010.
Co-director Pippa Ehrlich, who accepted the Oscar at the ceremony in Los Angeles with co-directing colleague James Reed, said she was “utterly overwhelmed” with “an honour we never dreamed possible”.
“In many ways this really is a tiny personal story that played out in seaforest at the very tip of Africa, but on a more universal level I hope that it provided a glimpse of a different type of relationship between human beings and the natural world.”
In a personal letter, President Cyril Ramaphosa congratulated the production team before the ceremony for “documentary storytelling at its best, with a deeply resonant conservation message”.
My Octopus Teacher gently lures the audience into a deep sense of wonder and compassion for the magical and biodiverse world of the Great African Seaforest, where underwater tracker Craig Foster builds a profound relationship with a common octopus while diving near his home in False Bay.
Last year the film became the first South African documentary to become a Netflix Original.
It was released to instant acclaim during the Covid-19 lockdown, which Ehrlich acknowledged as partly serendipitous to the film’s stellar rise in popularity: “In a difficult year, where many of us were stuck inside, feeling afraid and confused, a positive story that transports you to a magical world has a powerful appeal.
“Parts of this story are universal to almost every person on Earth – love and friendship, and connection and hope,” Ehrlich said. “It’s about nature, but it’s also a very powerful, archetypal story that helps us make sense of the world.”
Foster, a documentary filmmaker for 28 years, says the Oscar victory brings life-affirming kudos to the media advocacy work by the film’s producing entity, the Sea Change Project, which he co-founded with My Octopus Teacher associate producer Ross Frylinck in 2012.
“What has been most exciting for us as an organisation has been the feedback. We have received thousands of messages from people around the world. Many have started diving, studying marine sciences or using My Octopus Teacher as a tool in mental health workshops, and in discussions around emotional ecology and deep nature connection. We wanted to showcase this wonderful ecosystem, the Great African Seaforest, to the world, and we have succeeded.” | Entertainment