Metropolis – A Day in Reef City is a short natural history film that reveals the hidden life of a coral reef over the course of a single day.

Beneath the surface, the reef behaves like a living city. Thousands of creatures move through it with purpose.

Filmed in the biodiverse waters of Southeast Asia, the film observes this underwater world with patience and curiosity. Instead of focusing on a single species, Metropolis explores the reef as a complex ecosystem where every inhabitant plays a role in maintaining balance.

The result is an intimate portrait of a fragile world that supports an extraordinary amount of life and a reminder of how much is happening beneath the surface of our planet’s oceans.

Metropolis was created over months of filming across tropical reef systems, with most of the story taking shape on one special reef in Indonesian waters. Additional footage was captured in the Maldives and Timor Leste.

Built from more than 300 hours of underwater footage, the film is the result of patience, repetition, and close observation. Instead of staging moments, the process was about returning again and again until the reef revealed its own stories.

This approach allowed the film to capture intimate behavior and turn scattered encounters into a single day in Reef City.