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1. The Silent World (1956)
Jacques Cousteau's first feature documentary, filmed aboard Calypso in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean. Won the Palme d'Or at Cannes and the Academy Award for Best Documentary. Extraordinary historical footage. It remains the document that introduced millions of people to what was below the ocean surface.
2. Atlantis (1991)
Luc Besson's entirely underwater documentary with no voiceover or narrative, just Hans Zimmer's score and footage of marine life. More an emotional experience than an educational one; the humpback whale sequences are among the most beautiful underwater footage ever shot.
3. Sharkwater (2006)
Rob Stewart's activist documentary on shark finning and the shark fin trade. Extremely well-filmed and emotionally impactful. Stewart drowned while diving in Florida in 2017 during the filming of a follow-up.
4. A Perfect Planet (2021, BBC)
David Attenborough's series on the forces that make Earth habitable. The ocean and reef episodes include some of the finest underwater photography produced by the BBC Natural History Unit.
5. Seaspiracy (2021)
Controversial Netflix documentary on commercial fishing practices. Criticised by marine biologists for several factual simplifications, but widely credited with increasing awareness of the scale of industrial fishing's ecological impact.
6. Blue Planet (2001, BBC) and Blue Planet II (2017, BBC)
The definitive television natural history series on ocean life. Blue Planet II in particular includes sequences — the deep-sea bioluminescence, the whale grieving behaviour, the plastic ocean episode — that represent the current state of the art in underwater documentary filmmaking.
7. My Octopus Teacher (2020)
Academy Award winner. South African filmmaker Craig Foster spent a year free-diving daily in the kelp forests of False Bay and building a relationship with a single common octopus (Octopus vulgaris). The octopus behaviour captured is genuinely extraordinary.
8. Mission Blue (2014)
Netflix documentary on Sylvia Earle and the Hope Spots initiative. A primer on Earle's career and the state of the world's oceans as of 2014. The arguments for marine protected areas are clearly presented.
9. Chasing Coral (2017)
Netflix documentary on coral bleaching; specifically, the attempt by a team of videographers to document the 2016 mass bleaching event on the Great Barrier Reef in real time. The emotional arc — documenting the death of reefs in front of the camera over weeks — is unusual in documentary filmmaking.
10. Inside the Perfect Shark (National Geographic)
Scientific investigation of great white shark physiology, hunting behaviour, and sensory systems. Some of the most technically difficult underwater filming ever attempted.
11. The Cove (2009)
Oscar-winning documentary on the annual dolphin drive hunt in Taiji, Japan. Fundamental viewing for anyone interested in marine conservation and the ethics of ocean wildlife tourism.
12. Underwater Dreams (2014)
Documentary on a team of undocumented high school students in Arizona who built an underwater ROV and won the Marine Advanced Technology Education (MATE) ROV competition against MIT. About the democratization of underwater technology and diverse pathways into ocean science.