Bioluminescence Captured In Edie Widder Doc ‘A Life Illuminated’

Director Tasha Van Zandt went to great lengths to make her documentary A Life Illuminated – and to enormous depths. More than 3,000 feet, in fact.

Van Zandt descended over half a mile to the ocean floor in a submersible to film the work of pioneering marine biologist Dr. Edie Widder, who has observed and studied more deep ocean phenomena than perhaps anyone alive. Her discoveries have “transformed how we perceive life in the deep sea,” the filmmaker writes. “[Widder] began her career at a time when the deep sea was considered a dark, empty void. But Edie dared to look differently. Through her courage, curiosity, and her lens, she revealed the ocean as a glowing, dynamic world.”

Widder has uncovered a once-hidden “language of light” – dazzling bioluminescence that pervades ocean depths.

“Edie actually says, ‘Because so much of our ocean world is bioluminescent and the ocean is so vast, bioluminescence may be the most common form of communication on our planet,’” Van Zandt said at a Q&A Wednesday that followed a screening of her film in Santa Monica, CA, a short distance from the Pacific. “’What is this language we don’t understand?’”

It took the development of submersibles capable of withstanding tremendous atmospheric pressures to enter that sunken water world. But something more was required to reveal the life forms and their activities so far below the surface – truly innovative thinking that has been the hallmark of Dr. Widder’s scientific career. She led the invention and design of multiple devices to “enable unobtrusive deep-sea observations,” as noted by the Ocean Research & Conservation Association (ORCA), which Widder founded.

As the documentary explores, Widder developed an “eye-in-the-sea” system to remotely monitor deep ocean marine life. It uses far-red illumination, which she understood wouldn’t bother creatures in the depths because most of them don’t perceive infrared light. Widder also created an “electronic jellyfish,” an ingenious optical lure aimed to tempt sea creatures into camera range. By deploying one of the lures, she became the first person to capture video of a giant squid alive, a multi-tentacled animal trying to make a dinner of the faux jellyfish.

“In 2012, I, along with the rest of the world, saw this first footage of a live giant squid in its natural habitat,” Van Zandt recounted. “And I was transfixed by it, but it wasn’t until years later that I started to really sit with the question of who was the person behind the camera and how did this [footage] come to be? And so, in 2020, I reached out to Edie Widder for the first time. And on our very first conversation, she started to share how that was just one of hundreds of discoveries she had made in this quest to transform how we see our ocean planet. And that is when the spark for this film began.”

Eventually, Van Zandt took the plunge with Dr. Widder.

“When I was able to dive with Edie, we saw things that likely no one has ever seen before, even beyond this film that we couldn’t even capture on camera because it was so faint to the human eye. And it was remarkable,” the director said. “There are incredible creatures in our oceans that we can’t even begin to fathom how to even look for yet. So, it was completely life-changing.”

For decades now, Widder has been documenting the light show created by marine animals that mix chemicals in their bodies to generate bioluminescence. Van Zandt structures the film around the scientist’s mission to capture the flashback effect (her white whale, as Edie describes it), an attempt to see how bioluminescent creatures respond when they’re flashed with light from an otherwise darkened sub. It was a daunting task for Van Zandt and director of photography-producer Sebastian Zeck to try to reveal that experiment.

“Filming in the deep sea in complete darkness from a submersible is a huge technical challenge, but everything sort of came together on that very last dive,” Zeck explained at the Q&A. “We used these specialized cameras provided by Canon to film that [flashback effect] sequence. Light sensitivity in photography is measured in what’s called ISO. Normally in a daylight setting, we’re shooting at ISO 800 or so. The sequence at the end of the film, we shot at ISO 100,000. So, that gives you a sense of the sensitivity required.”

The attempt by humans to communicate with marine animals may evoke, for some, a classic Steven Spielberg film about first contact with extraterrestrials.

“It really felt like all of the [marine] life was kind of responding in this fantastical way and truly felt like Close Encounters,” Van Zandt marveled. “We flashed the lights, everything flashed back. And it felt like we were in the center of the Milky Way, but with blue glitter all around us. It was glowing and sparking. And just like the 4th of July — like [Edie] describes from her first experience. But then in the distance, we were seeing things that the camera couldn’t even capture. There was life swooshing and sweeping and this glowing golden, amber-colored creature that we don’t even really know what it was that was off in the distance. And also something fascinating is that the camera picked up this little creature called a tomopterid worm, which glows kind of a golden orange color that flashed along with all of the blue bioluminescence we were seeing.”

A Life Illuminated, from Sandbox Films and XTR, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last September, going on to screen at the Camden International Film Festival in Maine, Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival in Arkansas, CPH:DOX in Copenhagen, SFFILM’s Doc Stories and many other festivals in the U.S. and abroad. It began its theatrical run on July 24 at DCTV Firehouse Cinema in Manhattan and the documentary opens Sunday at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco (where Van Zandt and Zeck are based). The 12:50 p.m. Roxie screening on Sunday will be followed by a Q&A moderated by oceanographer Sylvia Earle.

With its spectacular imagery of bioluminescent creatures, not to mention a giant squid measuring somewhere between 2-4 storeys tall, this is a film that demands to be seen on the big screen. That’s the closest most of us will ever come to observing the astounding sights Edie Widder has witnessed for decades.

Van Zandt says she regards her protagonist as an inspiration.

“Going into the [final] dive… one of my greatest fears was how would I respond, if I would feel fearful, if I would panic. And she kept saying to us, ‘Just focus on curiosity instead of fear.’ And when we went down on the dive, that was really the guiding factor. There were definitely moments where I had to say, ‘Curiosity over fear, curiosity over fear,’” Van Zandt recalled. “This lifetime of seeing things no one’s ever seen before and breaking depth limits and just so many courageous moments that she’s lived through has really instilled in her this incredible grounded-ess. It’s really remarkable.”