Chasing Coral (2017)

This ninety-minute Netflix Original Documentary debuted at the Sundance film festival, where it won an Audience Award, and was then subsequently streamed on the Netflix site. The movie takes its inspiration from director Jeff Orlowski's 2012 film called Chasing Ice, in which teams placed twenty-five time lapse cameras among the glaciers of Iceland, Greenland, Alaska, and Montana. The "before and after" photos are shocking. The same is true here. For his new film, Orlowski gathered scientists, divers, and photographers to document the radical changes taking place among coral reefs all over the world. In particular, they capture before and after photos of coral bleaching, a sure sign of marine death that's caused by a rise in the water temperature due to global warming. It's predicted that in about thirty years, we will have lost about half of all the world's coral reefs, due entirely to the way humanity has decided to live. The images in this film are both exotic and tragic.