Windswept nautical views, choppy seas and cloud-mottled skies mingle elegantly with marine laboratory close-ups in this short documentary from the lauded Los Angeles director and Time magazine photographer Spencer Lowell. Captured over a five-day trip aboard “Tara”, the scientific vessel owned by agnès b. company director Étienne Bourgeois, Lowell’s images reflect the rhythm of the unknown waters while distilling the advanced work undertaken by the ship’s crew and researchers, often assisted by artists and journalists, towards understanding how what lies beneath impacts our lives above. “The most emotional moment was waking up on a Saturday morning and going onto the deck to be surrounded by 360 degrees of water,” the filmmaker recalls. “I had never been out where you couldn’t see land anywhere. It was completely surreal.” Having made expeditions across the seas of Greenland, Antarctica, Patagonia and South Georgia, “Tara”—formerly Sir Peter Blake’s “Seamaster”—reveals the surprising yet critical importance of plankton and other micro-aquatic organisms, which generate 50 percent of the oxygen in the atmosphere and consume 75 percent of the carbon dioxide. This is something the designer and culture doyenne agnès b. has paid a key interest in over the past decade. “She believes that the situation today will be the humanitarian crisis of tomorrow,” Secretary General and Operations Manager of the Tara Oceans project Romain Troublé says of her involvement. “There is scientific activity around plankton all over the world, but we also look at the environment and its neighbors—something that’s rarely, or never, been done on a global scale as we do with Tara.”