User Reviews

This is a beautifully shot documentary that gives insight into the backstory of the Dreyer family and their motivation for creating Ocean Conservation Namibia.

It's wonderful to learn more about the history of the organisation and the people doing the incredible work, especially Katja and the admin team who don't normally get much air time on YouTube but keep things running smoothly in the background so that the rest of the crew can focus on the rescues.

There is some challenging footage and it's not for the faint hearted, but there's also some absolutely atonishing and remarkable footage. An example is the successful rescue of a beached whale and you can feel the genuine joy and elation felt by the team.

You really get an insight into the daily struggle and emotional toll on the OCN crew but also their utter commitment and dedication to the cause.

The videography and music are stunning and some of the shots will literally have you saying "Wow".

I highly recommend watching this documentary and also the extensive video collection on YouTube and other social media.

This film is a nice chronicle of the brief history of the team at Ocean Conservation Namibia. I absolutely love their work, which anyone can see in daily seal rescue videos on YouTube. I highly recommend looking them up, and I follow them religiously myself. They are undeniable heroes.

This documentary is produced by Now Now Media, folks who have a lot of recent experience filmmaking at sea, so the professionally shot footage is immaculate alongside the GoPro footage that the OCN team records.

However, the documentary doesn't cover much else. The OCN team performs the very personal work of rescuing individual seals and other animals from entanglements, and they raise some awareness of ocean pollution on social media. But a documentary focused on them has the potential to discuss much more about the circumstances surrounding their work, and this one really doesn't. It contains interviews with supposed experts, a few commercial fishermen, and a Namibian politician or two, and they talk in broad strokes about the big picture while (likely) stock footage shows us various beaches covered in plastic junk. I got the feeling that these segments of the documentary were "obligatory," and the filmmakers thought it too much trouble to sift through more detailed information that their expert interview subjects may have provided.

Here are some topics that I think this documentary could have explored, but either didn't cover or only gave a brief explanation of:

• Namibian politics, specific politicians and their plans to combat pollution, and the remoteness of Walvis Bay (where OCN is based) from where the Namibian parliament operates in Windhoek
• Specific companies that operate in Namibian waters, or benefit from commercial fishing, and their ties to other countries
• The lifetimes and migrations of various pollutants that cause seal entanglements, including some that are biodegradable but definitely hurt wildlife in the meantime

I'm certain that the above topics are a lot to ask for, but they would be what sets truly great investigative documentary work apart from this film. This film is for the seal rescuers-and they do deserve a nicely produced film like this, for posterity-but it's not much else, in my opinion. At best, I think it's a starting point for concerned viewers to do more of their own research or read dry academic papers.