A Year on Earth
(Finalist: Childrens)
Bahati Productions, Animal Planet, Discovery Kids, 120 minutes
Three teenagers, five continents, one mission: To take the pulse of our planet and report back to their generation. With little in common except for a shared concern that time is running out for the planet they traded a year at school for a classroom without walls to study the largest, most pressing environmental issues of our time.

Christmas in Yellowstone
(Finalist: Original Musical Score)
Nature/WNET, HD 57 minutes
Stretching across more than 2.2 million acres of Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho, its one of the greatest expanses of unspoiled nature and wildlife anywhere on Earth - Yellowstone National Park. Despite almost three million visitors a year only a small fraction will glimpse the park’s stunning vistas, geological wonders and animal residents during the winter months, a time when nature’s inhospitality is matched only by its serenity.

Discover Hetch Hetchy hosted & narrated by Harrison Ford
(Finalist: Nonbroadcast, Interactive)
Backcountry Pictures, Environmental Defense, 26 minutes
Like its renowned twin, Yosemite Valley, Hetch Hetchy was carved by glaciers and is ringed by sheer granite cliffs and waterfalls. Tragically, in 1923 this national treasure was dammed and flooded under 300 feet (100 meters) of water for use as a reservoir. Hosted and narrated by Harrison Ford, Discover Hetch Hetchy is the centerpiece of a national campaign to drain the reservoir and restore the Hetch Hetchy Valley.

Ocean Voyagers narrated by Meryl Streep
(Finalist: Theatrical)
Feodor Pitcairn Productions, HD 70 minutes
Exploring familiar themes of motherhood and parenting in a world as unfamiliar as it is breathtaking, this high definition feature explores a precocious newborn humpback and his enormous 40-ton mother. Acclaimed for an intimacy never achieved on screen before these remarkable images will prove to be a revelation in our understanding of one of nature’s most enigmatic animals.

Red Velvet
(Finalist: People and Animals)
Compass Films, 58 minutes
In Southern Siberia, in the heart of the Altai Mountains, thousands of maral deer live in gigantic protected reserves. For centuries, every spring, their velvet antlers have been cut off in a bloody ritual to provide the Koreans with a natural sought-after aphrodisiac. Throughout an entire year in Russian Altai, Red Velvet recounts the fate of the maral deer and follows the unlikely journey of their antlers to South Korea.

The Curse of Copper
(Finalist: Environmental)
True Nature Films, 34 minutes
When a Canadian Mining Company obtains the rights to mine copper in one of the world’s biological hotspots – a pristine cloud forest in the heart of the Andes Mountains of Ecuador - local communities oppose the mine as it will ruin their livelihood and destroy their environment, home to many endangered species. Follow the consequences as the company ignores their heart-felt pleas and pushes the project forward, with disastrous consequence.

The Meadow
(Finalist: Cinematography)
Studio Hamburg Production GmbH / NDR Naturfilm, 43 minutes
We all know it, we all love it – the breathtaking flower meadow. This ocean of colors and fragile shapes offers a home, a genuine paradise, to countless species of animals. Some live underground, some among the blades of grass, still others populate the colorful “canopy”.

Wolverines, Hyenas of the North
(Finalist: Newcomer)
Studio Hamburg Production GmbH / NDR Naturfilm, HD 53 minutes
This high definition produced special is a little wildlife filmmaking sensation: To meet one of the shyest predators of the Northern hemisphere, the wolverine, a beginning director & cameraman meets with an 18 year veteran  photographer with a lot of tricks to share, enabling them to to film wild wolverines for the first time and to create an intimate portrait of the Hyenas of the North.