The Earth In Focus 2026 winners are in. The Earth In Focus Nature Film Festival named its film and photography award recipients at a ceremony on Saturday, 7 November, with The Last Place on Earth taking Best Feature Documentary and Nakul Raj named Nature Photographer of the Year.
Mr Melvyn Ong, Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Sustainability and the Environment, was Guest of Honour. The evening presented nine film awards, the Earth In Focus Nature Photography Awards and the Sentosa Nature Photography Awards. This year’s theme was The Future We Choose. If you caught the festival’s screenings at GV Cineleisure, as we noted in our earlier guide to the festival, this is how the awards turned out.
Film awards: a Leuser Ecosystem documentary leads
Nine awards recognised filmmakers from ten countries. David Booth Gardner’s The Last Place on Earth follows five activists over eight years as they fight to protect Indonesia’s Leuser Ecosystem, described as the last place on Earth where tigers, elephants, rhinos and orangutans coexist in the wild.
- Best Feature Documentary: The Last Place on Earth, David Booth Gardner (Indonesia and USA)
- Best Short Documentary: Escape, Anna Danielle Moore (Australia and USA)
- Best Artistic Film: I’ll Need To Leave For A Little While, Myles Storey (Malaysia and Vietnam)
- Best Climate Film: SPOILED, Nicola Gerrard and Janelle Barnard (South Africa)
- Best Student Film: The Little Grebes, Phoebe Lim (Singapore)
- Best Cinematography: Sama, Sébastien Guery (France)
- Best Editing: Connections: Bound by Hunger, Mertens Dominique (Belgium)
- Best Writing (Narration and Script): Mysteries of the Red Sea, Jacob Harrell (USA)
- Best Sound and Music: The Ancient Forest, Irina Schaepman and Vladislav Grishin (Russian Federation)
Two entries stand out for different reasons. I’ll Need To Leave For A Little While blends puppetry and documentary to follow NoNose, a critically endangered Tonkin snub-nosed monkey. Closer to home, Singapore’s Phoebe Lim won Best Student Film for The Little Grebes, in which two sisters learn how their actions affect nature on a birding trip.
Photography awards: Nakul Raj named Nature Photographer of the Year
Nakul Raj won Earth In Focus Nature Photographer of the Year for Plenty to Go Around. Karthik Subramaniam took two awards: runner-up for Nature Photographer of the Year and the Conservation category, both for Airlifted.
- Nature Photographer of the Year: Nakul Raj, Plenty to Go Around
- Runner-up, Nature Photographer of the Year: Karthik Subramaniam, Airlifted
- Young Nature Photographer of the Year: Marcus Kuan, The Patient Silhouette
- Photojournalist of the Year: Wayne Chng, A Second Chance
The organisers also shared the winning photographs from the festival’s other categories, including Karthik Subramaniam’s Coyotes and Sirens and Alexis Thie’s From Generation to Generation.
Who is behind Earth In Focus
Earth In Focus is conceptualised and managed by Wild Space, a conservation organisation that runs educational and hands-on nature and biodiversity programmes. Wild Space was founded by conservationist Daphne Ong in November 2022, and she hopes the festival will become a beacon of hope for environmental consciousness in the region. The Sentosa Nature Photography Awards, which sit within the ceremony, tie in with the competition we covered in our Sentosa Nature Photography Competition guide.
For more on the winners, see the festival’s website at earthinfocus.co. Media interview requests can go through Wild Space at [email protected].
