How My Octopus Teacher Depicts Healthy Masculinity
In My Octopus Teacher, documentary filmmaker Craig Foster models healthy masculinity by showing us a trusting, gentle, and emotionally fulfilling bond with an octopus.

Danny Berish’s grandparents met at a nudist camp in 1949. In an effort to understand his grandparents’ radical lifestyle, he meets and mingles with members of Van Tan, Canada’s oldest naturist club.
In My Octopus Teacher, documentary filmmaker Craig Foster models healthy masculinity by showing us a trusting, gentle, and emotionally fulfilling bond with an octopus.
From its visually stunning opening credits, which show women dancing through a forest to musical rhythms that sound almost primal, to its quiet, heartbreaking final frame, Mona Fastvold’s historical rendering of the Shaker religious movement is an experience that will stay with me for a long time.
“It's not ghosts. It's not supernatural. It's... It's America. And it's everywhere.”
J Brooke, Incluvie Guest Columnist on 'Life and Beth' and 'Sort of': while living one’s truth is freedom, speaking it as a mandatory assignment can become captivity.
Four documentaries, now streaming on the Criterion Channel, embody the adopted slogan of the current protest movement: Woman, Life, Freedom