Oceans

Oceans (2010) is a French-American nature documentary you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Jacques Perrin — the filmmaker behind Winged Migration (2001). Clocking in at 84 minutes, it was shot across dozens of locations worldwide over four years of production.

Perrin and co-director Jacques Cluzaud placed cameras at the surface, underwater, and in the air to follow creatures from tiny crustaceans to whale sharks and sea lions — all in open water, not tanks. The footage includes rarely seen behaviour: vast shoals of fish moving as a single rippling mass, a seahorse gripping a jellyfish to stay afloat in heavy swells, a crab shedding its shell on the ocean floor. The scale shifts constantly, from an individual animal to an entire ecosystem in a single cut.

What Perrin understood from his earlier work is that nature documentaries live or die by restraint — by letting the image breathe rather than burying it in narration. Oceans threads an environmental note through the film without letting it overwhelm what is, first of all, an extraordinary piece of visual filmmaking. Stream Oceans (2010) online on iFILM.