My Octopus Teacher: quietly enthralling, Pippa Ehrlich and James Reed’s documentary about the relationship of a man and an animal is the sum of two very strong halves. The film is beautiful, both underwater and overland: particularly the submarine footage, by Roger Horrocks and Craig Foster, is soothing, but also informative and exciting. Editors Pippa Ehrlich and Dan Schwalm, using musical composer Kevin Smuts’ beautiful work, are able to create sequences of incomparable beauty and also the most exciting chase of the past year. The trick for that is the other half of the film, the heartfelt narration of Craig Foster: his awakening to ecological matters, as he tells it, is not surprising (he was diving and putting himself in that position, in the first place), but as he ties that to his emotional connection to the female octopus he befriends, its fate becomes paramount. Each half works beautifully on its own, but their interaction with each other makes the whole more than the sum of the parts.