Craig Foster | |
|---|---|
 Photo of Craig Foster taken by an octopus in 2024 | |
| Nationality | South African |
| Occupation(s) | Documentary filmmaker, naturalist |
| Known for | My Octopus Teacher |
| Spouse | Swati Thiyagarajan |
| Children | 1 |
Craig Foster is a South African documentary filmmaker, naturalist, and founder of the Sea Change Project. He is known for the 2020 film My Octopus Teacher , for which he won an Academy Award in 2021.
In 2012, Foster co-founded the Sea Change Project, a nonprofit group to protect marine life and raise awareness of the importance of the kelp forest in South Africa. [1] [2]
When making The Great Dance: A Hunter's Story (2000) and My Hunter's Heart (2010), [3] he learned some of the animal tracking techniques from the San people of the Kalahari Desert. [4]
Foster was the subject, producer, [2] and photographer of a 2020 Netflix Original film called My Octopus Teacher , directed by Pippa Ehrlich and James Reed. [5] [6] The movie is about his experience diving in the kelp forests at a remote location in False Bay, near Cape Town, in the Western Cape of South Africa. [7] During that time, he found a common octopus who began to trust him, and he revisited and filmed her every day for that year. [8] Foster started filming in 2010 and the project was ten years in the making. It was the first Netflix Original South African nature documentary. [1]
Underwater footage not shown in the movie but filmed by the same team, at the same location, and about the same subject, had been shown previously on Blue Planet II , episode 5. [4] [9]
During the course of his underwater tracking, Foster discovered eight new species of shrimp. One of them, Heteromysis fosteri , was named after him. [4] [10]
Foster is married to Indian documentary filmmaker and environmental journalist Swati Thiyagarajan. He has a son, Tom, by his former wife. [11] [12]
In 2021, Foster co-authored the book Underwater Wild with Ross Frylinck. [13] [4]
In 2024, he published Amphibious Soul: Finding the Wild in a Tame World. [14]
| Award | Date of ceremony | Category | Recipient(s) | Result | Ref. |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Academy Awards | 25 April 2021 | Best Documentary Feature – My Octopus Teacher | Pippa Ehrlich, James Reed, and Craig Foster | Won | [15] |
| British Academy Film Awards | 11 April 2021 | Best Documentary – My Octopus Teacher | Pippa Ehrlich, James Reed, and Craig Foster | Won | [16] [17] |
| Critics' Choice Documentary Awards | 16 November 2020 | Best Narration – My Octopus Teacher | Craig Foster | Nominated | [18] |
| International Documentary Association Awards | 16 January 2021 | Pare Lorentz Award – My Octopus Teacher | Pippa Ehrlich, James Reed, and Craig Foster | Won | [19] |
| Producers Guild of America Awards | 24 March 2021 | Outstanding Producer of Documentary Theatrical Motion Pictures – My Octopus Teacher | Craig Foster | Won | [20] |
Foster's film projects include: [21] [3]
Jacques-Yves Cousteau, was a French naval officer, oceanographer, filmmaker and author. He co-invented the first successful open-circuit self-contained underwater breathing apparatus (SCUBA), called the Aqua-Lung, which assisted him in producing some of the first underwater documentaries.
Martin Charles Scorsese is an American filmmaker. He emerged as one of the major figures of the New Hollywood era. He has received many accolades, including an Academy Award, four BAFTA Awards, three Emmy Awards, a Grammy Award, and three Golden Globe Awards. He has been honored with the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1997, the Film Society of Lincoln Center tribute in 1998, the Kennedy Center Honor in 2007, the Cecil B. DeMille Award in 2010, and the BAFTA Fellowship in 2012. Four of his films have been inducted into the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant".
Craig McCracken is an American cartoonist, animator, director, writer, and producer known for creating Cartoon Network's The Powerpuff Girls and Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends, Disney Channel and Disney XD's Wander Over Yonder, and Netflix's Kid Cosmic.
Craig Houston Brewer is an American filmmaker. His 2005 movie Hustle & Flow won the Audience Award at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival and achieved commercial success, along with an Academy Award for Best Original Song, "It's Hard out Here for a Pimp". He is also known for directing the 2011 remake of Footloose, the 2019 film Dolemite Is My Name and the 2021 film Coming 2 America; the latter two starring Academy Award–nominee Eddie Murphy.
Rian Craig Johnson is an American filmmaker. He made his directorial debut with the neo-noir mystery film Brick (2005), which received positive reviews and grossed nearly $4 million on a $450,000 budget. Transitioning to higher-profile films, Johnson achieved mainstream recognition for writing and directing the science-fiction thriller Looper (2012) to critical and commercial success. Johnson landed his largest project when he wrote and directed the space opera Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017), which grossed over $1 billion. He returned to the mystery genre with Knives Out (2019) and its sequel Glass Onion (2022), both of which earned him Academy Award nominations for Best Original Screenplay and Best Adapted Screenplay, respectively.
The cinema of Lebanon, according to film critic and historian Roy Armes, is the only other cinema in the Arabic-speaking region, beside Egypt's, that could amount to a national cinema. Cinema in Lebanon has been in existence since the 1920s, and the country has produced more than 500 films.
The Sundance Film Festival is an annual film festival organized by the Sundance Institute. It is the largest independent film festival in the United States, with 423,234 combined in-person and online viewership in 2023. The festival takes place every January in Park City, Utah; Salt Lake City, Utah; and at the Sundance Resort, and acts as a showcase for new work from American and international independent filmmakers. The festival consists of competitive sections for American and international dramatic and documentary films, both feature films and short films, and a group of out-of-competition sections, including NEXT, New Frontier, Spotlight, Midnight, Sundance Kids, From the Collection, Premieres, and Documentary Premieres. Many films premiering at Sundance have gone on to be nominated and win Oscars such as Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor in a Leading Role.
Wanuri Kahiu is a Kenyan film director, producer, and author. She is considered to be “one of Africa's most aspiring directors, being part of a new, vibrant crop of talents representing contemporary African culture”. She has received several awards and nominations for the films which she directed, including the awards for Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Picture at the Africa Movie Academy Awards in 2009 for her dramatic feature film From a Whisper. She is also the co-founder of AFROBUBBLEGUM, a media collective dedicated to supporting African art for its own sake.
Luca Guadagnino is an Italian film director and producer. His films are characterized by their emotional complexity, eroticism, and lavish visuals. Guadagnino has received numerous accolades, including a Silver Lion, alongside nominations for an Academy Award and three BAFTA Awards.
Encounters South African International Documentary Festival (Encounters) is the premier documentary festival in Africa and one of the oldest film festivals on the continent. It remains one of only a few on the continent that is solely dedicated to the genre. The festival is organised by the Encounters Training and Development Institute. Since its inception, the festival has advanced the currency of documentaries in the country and region, supporting new productions and giving an African platform to international documentaries.
Julia Garner is an American actress. She is best known for her starring role as Ruth Langmore in the Netflix crime drama series Ozark (2017–2022), for which she received critical acclaim and won three Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series and a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress.
Craig Foster is an Australian former association footballer and current commentator and human rights advocate.
Naresh Bedi is an Indian filmmaker, the eldest of the Bedi Brothers and a member of the second generation of three generations of Wildlife photographers and filmmakers. He is the first Asian to receive a Wildscreen Panda Award and the first Indian to receive a wildlife film nomination for the British Academy Film Awards. He was honoured by the Government of India in 2015 with Padma Shri, the fourth highest Indian civilian award.
Anna Breytenbach is a South African interspecies communicator, animal activist, conservationist, and public speaker.
Stephen Robert Morse is an American-British filmmaker. He is known for producing the Primetime Emmy Awards-nominated Amanda Knox, and directing/producing EuroTrump on Geert Wilders. Morse earned a 42nd News & Documentary Emmy Awards nomination for writing In the Cold Dark Night. Morse serves as managing director of Lone Wolf Studios. Morse is the director/producer of How to Rob a Bank, the Netflix Original that premiered on June 5, 2024. The film was in the Netflix Global Top 10 for its first 2 weeks after release.
Mohammed Ali Naqvi is a Pakistani filmmaker based in New York City. He is known for documentaries which shed light on the socio political conditions of Pakistan, and feature strong characters on personal journeys of self-discovery. Notable films include Insha’Allah Democracy (2017), Among the Believers (2015), Shame (2007), and Terror’s Children (2003).
Valerie May Taylor AM is an Australian conservationist, photographer, and filmmaker, and an inaugural member of the diving hall of fame. With her husband Ron Taylor, she made documentaries about sharks, and filmed sequences for films including Jaws (1975).
Dick Johnson Is Dead is a 2020 American documentary film directed by Kirsten Johnson and co-written by Johnson and Nels Bangerter. The story focuses on Johnson's father Richard, who suffers from dementia, portraying different ways—some of them violent "accidents"—in which he could ultimately die. In each scenario, the elderly Johnson plays along with his daughter's black humor and imaginative fantasies. The film premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Special Jury Award for Innovation in Non-fiction Storytelling. It was released on Netflix on October 2, 2020.
My Octopus Teacher is a 2020 Netflix Original documentary film directed by Pippa Ehrlich and James Reed, which documents a year spent by filmmaker Craig Foster forging a relationship with a wild common octopus in a South African kelp forest. At the 93rd Academy Awards, it won the award for Best Documentary Feature.
Swati Thiyagarajan is an Indian conservationist, documentary filmmaker and environmental journalist, based in Cape Town, South Africa and New Delhi, India. She is a core team member of the Sea Change Project in South Africa and environmental editor at the Indian television news network of NDTV. Thiyagarajan is the recipient of the Carl Zeiss Award, Earth Heroes Award and two Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism Awards. Her work as the environmental editor at NDTV has been acclaimed internationally and she has been described as the doyenne of environmental journalism in India.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
