WNET Group & Love Nature Unveil The Ocean’s Greatest Feast

Love Nature and The WNET Group have teamed up for the new blue-chip documentary feature The Ocean’s Greatest Feast, which explores South Africa’s famous annual sardine run.

Produced by Earth Touch, the doc’s additional commissioning partners include Bonne Pioche Television (for France Télévisions) and SVT. Blue Ant International has worldwide distribution rights to the film, outside of its co-producing territories.

Taking place between May and July each year, the sardine run sees billions of sardines spawning and traveling up the east coast of South Africa to Mozambique, providing an annual “moveable feast” for a variety of marine predators. The Ocean’s Greatest Feast uses an array of new filming technology, including gyro-stabilized long lens drones, shotover cameras and a new remote underwater unit to bring the sardine run to life in full 4K.

The Ocean’s Greatest Feast will debut in the U.S. on PBS as part of its Nature series; Love Nature’s global linear and streaming platforms (outside of co-production territories); Sky Nature in the U.K., Italy and Germany; France Télévisions in France; and SVT in Sweden.

Carlyn Staudt, global general manager at Love Nature, said: “The cutting-edge technology and techniques that Earth Touch uses in The Ocean’s Greatest Feast not only showcases never-before-seen perspectives but results in an incredibly breathtaking and compelling story about the creatures who play a part in this natural phenomenon. This special is a perfect addition to Love Nature’s growing portfolio of groundbreaking and ambitious natural history programming.”

Fred Kaufman, executive producer for Nature, said: “South Africa’s sardine run is one of the planet’s greatest events. We’re excited to bring it to the PBS audience in this unprecedented way.”

Chris Fletcher, Earth Touch director of sales and programming, said: “We are delighted to have brought such an impressive and prestigious collection of partners into this project. We consider ourselves to be specialists in the sardine run. The first Earth Touch film, ten years ago, was on this subject and ended up being one of our highest-grossing films. We will revisit the sardine run again in this special using the same seasoned team—but now we have all the new technology at our disposal to really get to the heart of the action.”