King Charles III joined Attenborough for the blue carpet premiere at the Royal Festival Hall in London, where Ocean debuted as a landmark feature film. 

Captain Peter Hammarstedt, who attended the premiere, said: “Attenborough doesn’t pull any punches in Ocean. Never-before-seen footage of the damage caused by bottom trawling is as groundbreaking and stomach-churning as Attenborough’s call for change is inspiring. Sea Shepherd Global is proud to have brought some of the world’s most talented nature filmmakers to the frontlines of marine conservation—to see what our crew witnesses every day.”

Many of the documentary’s scenes were shot by Silverback Films while embedded aboard our ships Age of Union and Allankay during Sea Shepherd Global’s campaigns in Antarctica and West Africa. Over the past two years, their crews joined ours at sea to document key moments—exposing the destructive krill fishery in the Southern Ocean and confronting industrial trawlers threatening artisan fishing communities along the Liberian coast.

In one of the film’s segments, the crew onboard the Allankay captured the tense stand-off between krill supertrawlers and hungry whales. Krill—a tiny crustacean that feeds whales, seals, and penguins—is now being aggressively harvested to make Omega-3 supplements, despite available plant-based alternatives. As Attenborough narrates shocking footage of massive trawlers slicing through megapods of feeding whales, he warns, “Some might say it is sustainable, but they are taking out the foundation of the entire ecosystem.”

Ocean also follows the stories of local artisanal fishermen in Liberia, West Africa, whose waters have been plundered by bottom trawlers that fish illegally inside of waters reserved for small-scale fisheries. Those fishers include James Logan of the Liberia Artisanal Fishermen Association, who crewed on board Age of Union, and is seen in the film hauling in his net from a dugout canoe as an industrial trawler looms in the background—a stark symbol of the imbalance at sea.

Since 2017, we’ve partnered with the Liberian Coast Guard to conduct joint at-sea patrols. These efforts have led to the arrest of 25 vessels for illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing. As Logan told our crew during filming, “When the big boat shows up, the trawlers leave.”

Ocean with David Attenborough opens in cinemas worldwide starting May 8 and will stream on National Geographic, Disney+, and Hulu in June. Attenborough’s 2021 series A Perfect Planet also featured our work conserving and protecting Gabon’s waters.