Wildscreen Panda Awards 2026 Nominees Announced

National Geographic Tops Nominations as ‘Secrets of the Bees’, ‘Time and Water’ and ‘Chameleon Corridors” secure four nods each.

Wildscreen has revealed the 70 nominees for the Panda Awards 2026 - the highest honours in the international natural world storytelling film, TV and content industry.

National Geographic tops the list, receiving 15 nominations spanning 11 of the 18 awards categories, across both National Geographic and National Geographic Documentary Films.

National Geographic’s Secrets of the Bees, produced by Silverback Films, uses groundbreaking filming technology to reveal the extraordinary world of bees. Executive Produced by James Cameron and hosted by National Geographic Explorer, Bertie Gregory, the show is recognised across Behaviour, Children’s, Cinematography and Editing.

National Geographic Documentary Films’, Time and Water is nominated across Cinematography, Editing, Music and Scripted Narrative. Directed by the Academy Award®-nominated Sara Dosa (Fire of Love), the documentary is a poetic love letter to glaciers. Tasked to write the eulogy for Okjökull, the first glacier to be declared dead due to climate change, Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason reflects on how glaciers create an archive of deep time within their ice over millions of years. Time and Water is produced by Signpost Pictures in association with Compass Films.

Also recognised across four categories, Chameleon Corridors, tells the story of Tanzania’s Eastern Arc Mountains, narrated through the eyes of an endemic chameleon. Produced by AFRISOS, a fully Tanzanian production team, the film bends the genres between character-driven documentary and natural history storytelling and is nominated for Emerging Talent (Jigar Ganatra), Impact, Children’s and Short.

The BBC received 11 nominations across the longlist, the second most nominations for a broadcaster/platform, including commissions made to mark Sir David Attenborough’s 100^th birthday earlier in the year - Wild London (Passion Pictures) and Secret Garden (Plimsoll Studios).

The BBC’s Tiger Island secured a total of three nods, alongside National Geographic’s Pole to Pole. Tiger Island, produced by BBC Studios Natural History Unit and nominated for Behaviour, Sound and On-screen talent, follows a ground-breaking team of wildlife filmmakers and big cat experts as they reveal the secret lives of tigers thriving on an extraordinary, forested island in Nepal.

National Geographic’s Pole to Pole, produced by Nutopia, Westbrook Studios and Protozoa, follows Will Smith across all seven continents, where he faces extreme challenges, explores world-first science and reveals deep human connections to nature. It is nominated across Series, Cinematography and On-Screen Talent.

This year’s awards also sees the introduction of the Digital-First Category to recognise the importance of digital-first storytelling in diversifying the stories of nature being told, the storytellers and the audiences being reached. The inaugural nominees are: Bloomin’ Octopus, Conservation Entangled on Mongabay, Filming Madagascar’s Rarest Animals and Nature Ain’t A Luxury.

This year's shortlist comprises productions where 60% of Directors identify as those currently underrepresented within the genre including individuals that identify as Global Majority, BIPOC, women, part of the LGBTQIA+ community, neurodiverse, or living with a disability - a record for the awards.

The winners will be announced at the Panda Awards ceremony which will takes place on 22 October 2026 at the Apex Hotel in Bath, UK, the closing event of the Wildscreen Festival. The charity previously announced that the 2026 edition will move to the historic city of Bath from Bristol after 44 years, to ensure the Festival remains affordable for both the charity and its attendees.