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Before the 1975 masterpiece Jaws made us all afraid to go in the water, another film presented equally terrifying footage of real underwater nightmares. Directed by Peter Gimbel, the 1971 documentary Blue Water, White Death follows a group of aquatic photographers and adventurers determined to capture the first underwater footage of Carcharodon carcharias, the mythic apex predator commonly called the great white shark. While not a horror movie per se, the film presents breathtaking footage of massive sharks shot from within cages designed specifically for the expedition. It also includes shocking acts of animal cruelty and a dated understanding of marine wildlife. Premiering three years before publication of Peter Benchley’s best-selling novel Jaws, this unprecedented documentary formally introduced the world to the great white shark and likely planted seeds that would go on to change cinematic history as we know it.

Filmed in 1969, Gimbel and his crew departed from Durban, South...

Around the same time that Emmy-nominated writer-director Sally Aitken’s latest film was debuting in the World Documentary section at Sundance, the New York Times ran a piece on the alarming decline in the worldwide shark population, citing a 70% reduction since the 1970s. It’s a statistic — possibly conservative given the underreporting from some parts of the globe — that will be only too well known to the documentary’s subject, Valerie Taylor, the iconic Australian marine conservationist who has dedicated her life to the species’ preservation. This life is accessibly and straightforwardly celebrated in “Playing With Sharks”: As Dian Fossey was to gorillas and Jane Goodall is to chimps, so is Valerie Taylor to this 450-million-year-old class of carnivorous, cartilaginous fish.

In amongst surprisingly comprehensive archive footage of her youth as a world-class diver and spear-fisher, Taylor recounts her story in interview segments shot in her oceanside home. Though...