Chasing Coral

Chasing Coral (2017) is Jeff Orlowski's documentary, free to watch online on iFILM. A crew of divers, scientists and camera engineers plants time-lapse rigs on the ocean floor to record something almost nobody has filmed before: coral reefs bleaching white and dying in real time.

The shoot kept falling apart. Cameras fogged, autofocus failed, footage came back useless — so the team went back down, again and again, until they had the frames. One of them, former ad man and self-confessed coral nerd Zackery Rago, spends months on Australia's Great Barrier Reef and watches a living underwater city turn to bone-white rubble in a matter of weeks. Marine biologists Ruth Gates and Ove Hoegh-Guldberg lay out why a two-degree rise in water temperature sets off the collapse.

Orlowski, who also made Chasing Ice, again turns climate data into something you feel instead of skim. The film took the Audience Award at Sundance and later picked up an Emmy. What's rare here is the tension: it plays less like an eco-lecture and more like a slow-burn thriller where you dread the very shot you're waiting for. Stream Chasing Coral (2017) online on iFILM.