Ehrlich then had to figure out how to navigate some of the footage’s most dramatic moments, such as when the octopus, now warmed up to Foster, loses an arm to a pyjama shark when she’s caught off guard.
“On land, when you’re dealing with animals, they’ve known people in their space for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. But marine creatures are not used to us, they don’t know us,” Ehrlich said. “They’re much more likely to be curious, and much more likely to let you get close. There’s a lot of responsibility that comes with that, and that was something we tried exploring. Did this octopus feel a little too safe with Craig around, and that’s why she didn’t notice the shark until it was too late? What should he do at that point? Should he intervene? Shouldn’t he intervene?”
In John Was Trying to Contact Aliens, Matt Killip experienced a different kind of tension. The film follows UFO hunter John Shepherd, a gentle eccentric who’d spent three decades beaming a diverse range of music into outer space in the hopes of pinging extraterrestrial life. Killip had only about five days with Shepherd; he then spent a year on and off editing his footage, along with Shepherd’s own photographs and other footage.
No one spends 30 years playing records into space without believing aliens are real. But Killip was more interested in the humanity of Shepherd’s story. “Part of what John was doing was trying to make contact with aliens, but I do think he was trying to make contact with human beings,” he said.
“There was a slight tension between us about that,” he said. “I think John envisaged a History Channel–type documentary—are aliens out there? Can I prove that they exist? The more we spent time together, I think, he did start to understand what I was doing.” The result is an immersive 16-minute tone poem about a space DJ that shows just how far we’re willing to go to find connections.
A similar humanity is what drew director Ian Bonhôte to the subject of the Paralympic Games for his visually stunning Rising Phoenix, which interweaves the story of nine athletes who’ve turned physical limitations into extraordinary accomplishments with the tale of German Jewish refugee Ludwig Guttmann, a neurosurgeon who discovered that frequent turning of soldiers with spinal cord injuries in their beds saved their lives by preventing infection. His prescription for sporting activity and competition as an excellent form of physical therapy led to the first Paralympic Games in 1948.
“What really struck us was the fact that the Paralympics movement is this amazing disability civil rights organization,” Bonhôte said. “Not like the Olympics, which is this celebration of perfection in a way—perfect bodies, perfect scores. The Paralympics movement is actually about changing perspective, getting an audience and getting people to see people they might not see every day.”
Rising Phoenix introduces athletes from fencing to track to archery, capturing physical prowess made all the more compelling when viewers discover how each athlete honed theirs. We see French runner Jean-Baptiste Alaize, a 2017 bronze winner, who survived a machete attack at three years old. The story of wheelchair racer Tatyana McFadden, nicknamed the Beast for her massive upper body strength, is even more poignant when we see footage of her in a Russian orphanage, where she learned to move using only the strength of her arms.
As the panel wrapped, Tabsch noted that he initially thought these four films were too disparate to be grouped in together. But in discussing each other’s work, their similarities became obvious.