Somewhere off the coast, a woman is diving 3,300 feet into total darkness with a camera aimed at creatures no one has ever filmed before. That is the setup behind A Life Illuminated, the documentary that has been building buzz since it made the festival rounds last year. Fans who caught the trailer are already asking the obvious question, and the answer is not as simple as opening a streaming app.

A Life Illuminated is going to take some legwork to actually see.

Dr. Edie Widder's years chasing deep-sea footage are finally reaching audiences, one city at a time though A Life Illuminated. New York and Los Angeles have already had their turn. For now, no streaming release has been confirmed yet, which puts A Life Illuminated in the same holding pattern as most festival docs still chasing a distributor. The DCTV Firehouse Cinema run in NYC wrapped July 30, and Laemmle's Glendale and Santa Monica screenings closed out the same week. San Francisco picks it up August 2 at the Roxie Theater. 

The film keeps moving after that. Denver Museum of Science shows it on August 6, Toronto's Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema follows on August 7, and The World Theatre in Kearney, Nebraska runs it August 14 through 16. Houston's River Oaks Theatre hosts a screening on August 22, and Portland's Tomorrow Theater rounds out the announced dates on September 20. That gap is exactly what is pushing plenty of ocean-doc fans toward whatever is already sitting in their queue instead.

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All that travel raises the real question behind ticket sales: what is actually pulling people into theater seats? 

Dr. Edie Widder is the draw. She is the marine biologist who first captured footage of a giant squid in the wild, and now she is chasing something even harder to catch: bioluminescent life forms glowing 3,300 feet down, in water dark enough to swallow a headlamp whole. Director Tasha Van Zandt, who also made After Antarctica, frames Widder's dive as both a scientific mission and a personal one. Widder built her career in an industry that once treated women on a boat as bad luck. The film does not skip past that fight just to focus on the glowing creatures.

"A treasure, highlighting the remarkable career of an underwater scientist," said critic Jason Gorber.

The footage does a lot of the convincing on its own. Nothing about previous ocean documentaries prepares you for watching bioluminescence light up on camera for the first time, and it is the kind of documentary worth watching before anything else lands in your queue.

A Life Illuminated is not one tap away yet, but that is kind of the point. Between the expanding theater run and Widder's own story, streaming access starts to feel beside the point. The film does not just talk about creatures that glow; it shines its own light on the person who chased them into the dark.

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Would you drive across town just to catch a screening A Life Illuminated on the big screen? Let us know in the comments.