Attenborough's new doco is bringing audiences to tears. One voice has gone completely silent in its wake

Sydney Morning Herald

21 hours ago

In the darkness of the cinema during screenings of Sir David Attenborough's new film, Ocean, it is not uncommon to hear members of the audience weep for what they have lost, or more specifically, what has been taken from them as they looked elsewhere.
At 99, Attenborough's voice is still strong, and his capacity to move people with revelations of the astonishing world around them is undiminished.
Now there is growing evidence that of the many tens of documentaries he has presented or created over his career, Ocean is having the most immediate impact of them all.
'I believe Ocean will prove to be Sir David's masterpiece,' says Andrew Forrest, the billionaire Fortescue Metals Group chairman, whose Minderoo Pictures provided almost half the film's funding, and who recently attended its world premiere in London last month with Attenborough and King Charles.
The film (its full title is Ocean with David Attenborough) focuses on the wonder of our seas, and their centrality to life on earth, and reveals how rapidly they are being pillaged and destroyed by industrial fishing.
Of all Attenborough's films, it is his most political. 'We have drained the life from our ocean. Now we are almost out of time,' he says at one point.
One particular sequence in the film appears to having a profound impact not only on audiences, but on politicians and policymakers.
Having established the extraordinary beauty and complexity of life in the shallow waters of the world's continental shelves, the camera follows the chains of a bottom trawling net to the ocean floor. In the blue-green murk, it is a scene from a horror movie.
'From the surface you would have no idea that this was happening,' says Attenborough in the narration. 'It has remained hidden from view, until now.'