We are used to looking at the North Sea from the shore. Grey sky, heavy water, cold wind — a landscape that rarely brings to mind tropical splendour.
But once you descend beneath the surface, the familiar picture disappears.
In the greenish depths, forests of kelp unfold. Starfish and lobsters move among the stones. Rays glide over the seabed, seals approach the camera, and amid pink, purple and emerald hues, life goes on — a life whose existence most of us do not even suspect.
This world was right there all along. We simply spent too long looking only at the surface.
A film that restores the North Sea's colours
A documentary film North Sea, Nature Untamed was released in the Netherlands in 2024. Its director is Mark Verkerk, and the chief underwater cinematographer and the viewer's guide was Peter van Rodijnen, who has spent more than twenty years diving, exploring and filming the North Sea.
Work directly on the film continued for about seven years.
It is important to clarify this: what we have before us is not a new film or a new scientific study. The reason for returning to the film was its release in wide British distribution, scheduled for 25 September 2026, as well as a published 7 September 2026 feature in which the creators tell the story of the filming.
International distribution gives the film a new life — and today its message sounds especially timely. While the North Sea comes under pressure from industrial fishing, shipping, the oil and gas industry, pollution and the construction of energy facilities, it finally has the chance to be seen not as a resource or a transport route, but as a complex living world.
Seeing the almost invisible
Filming the North Sea is extremely difficult. It is shallow, cold and subject to strong currents. Seasonal plankton blooms make the water murky, and the weather can change within a matter of hours.
According to the creators, four out of every five planned dives had to be cancelled due to rough seas. Even when a dive became possible, conditions often left the cinematographer with only 20–30 minutes for filming.
But it is precisely the plankton, which prevents the camera from seeing, that lies at the foundation of the North Sea's food system. What hides this world from the human eye simultaneously sustains its life.
Thus, a technical obstacle is transformed into the film's central image: invisibility does not mean emptiness.
The protagonist is not a single animal
Seals, rays, sharks, orcas, lobsters, starfish, and the bluefin tuna, which has returned to northern waters, appear in the film. However, the creators deliberately avoid turning the film into a series of portraits of spectacular animals.
The protagonist here is the entire ecosystem.
A large predator exists because of fish. Fish depend on smaller organisms. Those feed on plankton, and life on the seabed needs rocks, seaweed, currents, and organic particles descending from the upper layers of the water.
Each participant may seem insignificant when viewed in isolation. But remove one link, and the changes will ripple through the entire system.
The film invites us to see the sea not as a collection of species, but as a single living organism in which the existence of each is supported by a multitude of visible and invisible connections.
The sea we barely hear
The underwater world of the North Sea is not only difficult to see—it is not easy to hear from the surface.
Meanwhile, the depths are filled with sounds: the movement of water, the clicks and signals of cetaceans, the voices of fish, and the noise of countless organisms. For animals living in murky water with limited visibility, sound becomes one of the most important ways to navigate, find mates, recognize danger, and maintain a connection with their surroundings.
But to the natural voices of the sea are added ship engines, sonars, and the impulse strikes that accompany the construction of offshore structures.
The film reminds us: underwater noise is not an abstract background. It becomes part of the environment in which animals must communicate, reproduce, and survive.
We may not hear what is happening underwater. But the sea hears us constantly.
Humans are already part of this system
North Sea, Nature Untamed does not depict the ocean as a pristine paradise existing separately from humans. Humans have long been part of what is happening—and their influence can be both destructive and creative.
The camera shows the consequences of bycatch and bottom trawling, which can seriously damage seabed habitats and their associated communities. At the same time, the authors avoid a simple division of the world into the guilty and the innocent. They talk to fishermen, observe industrial fishing, and try to understand the system as a whole.
The story of offshore wind farms proves equally ambiguous. Their construction is accompanied by powerful underwater noise. However, the rock protection around the foundations of the structures can over time become a new habitat for seaweed and animals, and the restriction of bottom trawling within certain areas creates a kind of unintentional marine sanctuary.
One of the most striking episodes is connected to stones that accidentally fell from a vessel about thirty years ago. Gradually their grey surface became covered with multicoloured life, turning into something like a small artificial reef.
The sea shows that nature is capable of responding with recovery if it is given space and time. But this capacity is not limitless and does not absolve humans of responsibility.
Why it is precisely today that we need to see this world
For a long time humanity's attention was turned to the oceans that are easier to turn into a beautiful image: to transparent tropical waters, coral reefs and bright exotic creatures.
The North Sea remained beyond this admiration. It was perceived as a grey industrial space — a place for fishing, shipping, energy extraction and the laying of infrastructure.
But it is impossible to protect what we have not learned to notice.
That is precisely why the film's international release today becomes more than a box-office event. It restores visibility to an ecosystem whose future is already being decided right now. The more actively humans transform the marine space, the more important it is to first see, hear and understand the life that already exists there.
This world did not need to become more beautiful. It needed to wait for a camera capable of conveying its beauty, and for a person ready to hold their attention on it.
What did the ocean remind us of today?
That a true miracle is not always far away. Sometimes it hides beneath a familiar grey surface — next to cities, ports and shipping routes.
The North Sea remained a backdrop to human activity for far too long. The film restores its right to be the protagonist — alive, colourful, sounding and endlessly interconnected.
We do not simply observe this life from the outside. We all exist within a single Universe, where the ocean, humans and every living being are parts of a vast interconnected system.
In it there are no insignificant forms of life. Each has its own value, occupies its own place and participates in sustaining the whole — from invisible plankton to the enormous whale, from a lone starfish to the human who has seen the world hidden beneath the water for the first time.
Perhaps the North Sea waited so long for our attention in order to remind us: to protect life means to recognise its value not only when it is beautiful, useful or understandable to us.
Every form of life is precious simply because it exists.
