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

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.

Co-director Keith Scholey and David Attenborough (right) on location while filming Ocean.

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.”

Attenborough describes how modern industrial bottom trawlers scrape the delicate ecosystem of the ocean floor with a chain, directing all the sea creatures above into its net.

“It smashes its way across the seabed, destroying nearly everything in its path, often on the hunt for just a single species. Almost everything else is discarded. Over three-quarters of a trawler’s catch may be thrown away,” says Attenborough.

“It is hard to imagine a more wasteful way to catch a fish.”

This practice, Attenborough explains, mows down an area the size of the Amazon rainforest each year, and the wastelands left in the wake of the trawlers leak carbon dioxide into the atmosphere rather than suck it down to the seabed as they did when healthy.

The practice is not only allowed in many protected marine areas, says Attenborough, but subsidised by many governments.

The movie, and this sequence in particular, became a focal point at a UN oceans conference held earlier this month, at which 19 new nations ratified a global high-seas treaty to protect oceans, bringing the total number to 51, and at which momentum to restrict bottom trawling gathered pace.

This was no accident, says the film’s co-director, Keith Scholey, who has collaborated with Attenborough for more than 40 years. He describes how he and underwater cameraman Doug Anderson approached him with the idea to make the film out of frustration that previous UN oceans conferences had passed by largely unreported, and therefore world governments did little to control the powerful global fishing industry.

Bottom trawling, says Scholey, is a method of fishing that has hardly changed in the 400 years since it was invented, except in scale and take.

“The techniques used are pretty Victorian,” he says. “And what is absolutely shocking, is that it is completely blind. The guy in the boat, pulling the net has got no idea what on earth that thing is doing down there.”

This is what he and Anderson sought to change. If people could see what was happening on the ocean floor, they would not let it keep happening. No one had ever successfully captured clear vision of the practice.

Anderson’s team developed and built cameras to withstand the violence of the sequence, and arranged to work with a non-government organisation in Turkey that had secured a commercial trawler to study the impact of the practice. (The team had first considered a site in British waters, but when they dropped the net and the cameras they discovered a patch of rare pink sea fans that grow just millimetres a year. They aborted the run and the location has now been protected.)

For a film that is sometimes painful to watch, Ocean, made for National Geographic, has had extraordinary reach. In the UK and Ireland, it had the highest grossing opening for a nature documentary on record; the highest documentary opening of this decade; and the widest released documentary ever, playing in 580 sites, according to Minderoo.

The bottom trawling sequence has now been watched on various online portals more than 20 million times.

The film’s backers ensured that most of the British government delegation that travelled to the UN conference had seen it before departure. At the conference, Britain announced new marine protection zones and new restrictions on bottom trawling. Australian Environment Minister Murray Watt watched Ocean during his flight to the event. He says the film underlined for him the urgency with which we need to act to protect the world’s oceans, and was seen at the conference as a call to action.

(He adds that Australia’s decision to increase protection of 30 per cent of its waters by 2030, a decision that was celebrated at the UN conference, was taken before he saw the film.)

The film is now being shown by universities and schools, charities and environmental groups. Richard Leck, who heads WWF’s marine conservation in Australia and is a veteran oceans campaigner, says from its work around the world WWF is aware that heads of state, ministers and industry bodies have all seen the film.

Author Gwynne Dyer wrote earlier this month, “With a single film clip, [Attenborough] has signed the death warrant for one of the world’s most destructive industries: bottom trawling. The companies and countries that do it will go down fighting, and it will take time, but they will go down.”

Scholey is gratified by the response and notes that one voice has gone remarkably quiet – that of the global fishing giants. He believes the industry is aware of the regard the world has for Attenborough.

He recalls how Attenborough once told him, “ ‘If I say stuff, people listen, and so I have to be sure, completely sure, that I’m right.’

“The cumulative effect of that is that he’s become completely trusted, so taking on the trust of the word of David Attenborough is a difficult thing to kind of do.”

Get to the heart of what’s happening with climate change and the environment. Sign up for our fortnightly Environment newsletter.