PORT ANGELES — Underwater images of Puget Sound will fill the screen at 7 p.m. Tuesday when Peninsula College’s Magic of Cinema film series presents the documentary “Beneath the Salish Sea.”
The filmmaker, Florian Graner, will talk about shooting the documentary and answer questions from the audience immediately after the film in Maier Performance Hall at the Port Angeles campus of Peninsula College, 1502 E. Lauridsen Blvd.
Admission is $5.
“Beneath the Salish Sea” features orcas, porpoises and other sea life as well as stormy seas around Cape Flattery.
The Salish Sea stretches from the southern end of Puget Sound northward to Desolation Sound in Canada.
Graner is the owner of Sealife Productions, a small Whidbey Island company he started in the early 1990s.
He concentrates on films and wildlife documentaries and provides still images, video and information to conservation groups and the film and publishing industries.
In 2010, proprietors of The Clyde theater in Langley asked Graner whether he would be interested in showing some of his underwater footage there.
Graner put together archival material from some of his dives, naming his effort “Beneath the Salish Sea: An Underwater Odyssey Through Puget Sound.”
The film has played at the The Clyde several times since, always to a packed house, Peninsula College said.
It gained support from the Northwest Straits Commission and local marine resources committees, and was screened in Olympia, Bellingham and Everett.
Graner’s cinematography assignments have taken him around the world, and he has worked on several film assignments for the BBC, the UK documentary company Icon Films, the German television company NDR
Naturfilm and National Geographic.
He grew up diving in Germany and became a certified research diver with the Biological Institution Helgoland.
He has since lived and dived in Norway, along the Sognefjord, and in California on the Monterey Peninsula.
Graner has a doctorate in marine biology with a specialization in marine mammals and works full time as a freelance marine cinematographer.
His films have been shown in many countries, and his images can be seen in various books, field guides and dive magazines.
He is currently filming on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula and in the Salish Sea for an NDR Naturfilm/National Geographic co-production.
For more information on the film series, email Sean Gomez at sgomez@pencol.edu.
For information on other upcoming events at Peninsula College, visit www.pencol.edu or www.facebook.com/PeninsulaCollege.