Hollywood Climate Summit and Jackson Wild have set finalists for their first joint awards ceremony Nov. 10 in Los Angeles spanning narrative film & TV from Train Dreams and Hacks, to unscripted and documentary This is a Gardening Show and Nuisance Bear.

Selected from over 500 global submissions, finalists represent “the most impactful, innovative, and inspiring storytelling,” the groups said.

Projects span the past two years. The joint awards will likely run every other year to ensure sufficient environmental narrative content.

HCS is the host of an increasingly popular annual summit in LA and provides a year-round community connecting entertainment professionals with climate experts. Jackson Wild, based in Jackson, Wyoming, has been a global leader in nature and conservation media for over 30 years and hosted its own annual awards. The organizations joined forces on the awards earlier this year, expanding Jackson Wild’s mostly documentary and social content to narrative features and television, podcasts, games, digital media and comedy.

“In this time of increasing environmental urgency, we must amplify and support the creatives finding new depths in climate and nature storytelling, and expand our thinking as an industry on what that storytelling can look like. This partnership expands that genre-bending creative spectrum, connects the communities making it happen, and puts a shared vision of a better world at the center,” said Heather Fipps, Executive Director of Hollywood Climate Summit.

“This year’s finalists invite audiences into the natural world through film, games, podcasts, and so much more, each one a testament to the extraordinary quality of storytelling happening right now,” said Christie Quinn, Executive Director of Jackson Wild. “Reaching people across genres and formats has never been more vital to the future of our planet, and celebrating the best of today’s storytelling is how we inspire what comes next.”

Finalists

NARRATIVE FEATURE

Bugonia —Element Pictures / Square Peg / CJ Enm Production in association with Pith and Fruit Tree Enterprises, Focus Features 

Remarkably Bright Creatures — Night Owl Stories, Netflix 

The Wild Robot — DreamWorks Animation, Universal Pictures

Train Dreams — Black Bear Pictures, Kamala Films, Netflix

Twisters — Amblin Entertainment, Universal Pictures, Warner Bros. Pictures

NARRATIVE SHORT   

Heat Me — ABCinema, in co-production with Orama Productions. 

MotherEarth Inc.  — Co-directed by Heather Mingo and Isabel Siragusa

Two Breaths — A film by Kateryna Kurganska

Wowsabout — The Jim Henson Company, in association with PBS 

TV SERIES – SCRIPTED DRAMA

Families Like Ours — Netflix (Denmark)

Lead Children — Netflix (Poland)

Radioactive Emergency — Netflix

The Last of Us — HBO Max

TV SERIES – SCRIPTED COMEDY

Four Seasons — Universal Television, Netflix

Hacks — Universal Television in association with Paulilu, First Thought Productions, Fremulon Productions, 3 Arts Entertainment

North of North — Netflix

Rage — Producciones Mandarina for HBO Max

TV SERIES – UNSCRIPTED

Building Outside the Lines — Painless TV, Magnolia Network

Réabhlóid Ar Chul An Tí / F* the Lawn— New Decade Films, Pier to Pier Media, SEETREE GmbH

The Wild Ones — Offspring Films, AppleTV+

This is a Gardening Show — Radical Media, Netflix

VIDEO GAME

Flock Around — Secret Plan Games

The Guardian of Nature — Inlusio Interactive

Planet Pigeon — Cracked Cubes and Thirteen Productions LLC, Minecraft EDU

Two Falls (Nishu Takuatshina) — Unreliable Narrators

COMEDY SPECIAL

Climate Science Translated — Houseband, Beyond The Deck, Utopia Bureau, Climate Science Breakthrough

Funeral for a Glacier — Day Two Productions, Green Olive Creative

Green Goddesses Take New York — UnchainedTV, CaveLight Films 

Slick Burn — Petty Victories

DIGITAL SERIES

Climate Town — Climate Town Productions

Do You Even Care? — Yellow Dot Studios

Slick — Carmack Productions

Study Hall Sustainability — Complexly, Arizona State University

The Firepit — United By Nature (powered by Nature Is Nonpartisan), Shelton Films

PODCAST

The Climate Denier’s Playbook — 400 Parts Per Million LLC

Sabotage — Good Luck Media, Yellow Dot Studios

The Last City — Wondery

Threshold — Aurice Productions

JACKSON WILD FINALISTS BY CATEGORY

FEATURE

Checkpoint Zoo — Ghost Robot, Appian Way, Noah Media Group, After Hours, Abramorama

Derek vs Derek — The Slate Works and Damer Films

Nuisance Bear — MUBI, A24

We, The Hated — A Firebreak Films production in association with Passion Planet, BFI/Doc Society, Bertha Foundation, Distributed by Propagate

LIMITED SERIES

Animal Oddballs — National Geographic, Wildstar Films, and Maximum Effort

Prehistoric Planet: Ice Age — BBC Studios in association with Apple

Secrets of the Bees — National Geographic and Silverback Films

Wild Side of the Moon — Produced by Humble Bee Films for Sky and Love Nature

DOCUMENTARY SHORT

Between Breaths — A Film by Florian Ledoux and Jozef Kaut

Chuuraa — A film by Evgenia Arbugaeva. Supported by National Geographic Society.

Plant Life — Speculative Films, Tangled Bank Studios, Catapult Film Fund, Berkeley Film Foundation

SILA — National Geographic Society, TENT Film

Wild East — Maia Wikler Productions, Sideyard Studios

INVESTIGATIVE

Rhapsody on the Outlaw Ocean — A Film by Ian Urbina and William Segal

Sentient — In Films Pty Ltd, Dogwoof, Madman Entertainment

The Last Place on Earth — Oceanic Preservation Society

PEOPLE & NATURE

Bucks Harbor — Two Wolves Films, National Geographic Society

The Tale of Silyan — National Geographic Documentary Films,  Ciconia Film, Concordia Studio, The Corner Shop

To Hold a Mountain — Directed by Biljana Tutorov and Petar Glomazić, Produced by Biljana Tutorov for Wake Up Films, In association with Points North Institute, Catapult Film Fund, Chicken & Egg Films. With the support of InMaat, IDA Enterprise Documentary Fund, Doc Society, Meadow Fund, Secret Sauce Media, Eurimages, Film Centre of Montenegro, Film Center Serbia, Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Serbia, CNC, Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur région, Slovenian Film Centre, Viba Film, Croatian Audiovisual Centre, UNIQA SEE Future Foundation

PLANET IN CRISIS

The Caldera — ITVS, Independent Lens, Grasso Films

The Plastic Detox — The Production credits should be: A Netflix Documentary | An OPS Productions, An L&T Productions, With Minderoo Pictures and Concordia Studio, In association  with City Hill Arts, Bay Bridge Productions and Diamond Docs

Time and Water — National Geographic Documentary Films, Sandbox, Signpost Pictures, Ninmah Foundation, Compass Films

We, The Hated — A Firebreak Films production in association with Passion Planet, BFI/Doc Society, Bertha Foundation. Distributed by Propagate

CINEMATOGRAPHY

A Gorilla Story: Told by David Attenborough — A Netflix Documentary | A Silverback Films Production
Cinematographers: Ben Cherry, Ewan Dryburgh, Benjamin Sadd and Toby Strong

Animal Oddballs: Daringly Different — National Geographic, Wildstar Films, and Maximum Effort
Cinematographers: Chris Watts, Simon De Glanville, Jeff Hester, Tom Rowland, Christian Marot, Andrew Studer, Olly Jelley, Hayes Baxley, Connor Gallagher

Muskox: Survival in the Arctic — Stay Wild Studio, Distributed by Off the Fence
Cinematographer: Chris Schmid

Secrets of the Bees: The Hive — National Geographic and Silverback Films
Cinematographers: John Brown, Alastair MacEwen

EXCLUSIVE: Netflix is exploring the world of dating following extreme weight loss in its latest non-scripted order.

Deadline understands the streamer has greenlit Weight To Date from The Intellectual Property Corporation (IPC).

The deal came only a few weeks after Eli Holzman and Aaron Saidman, who are now co-CEOs of the company, exited Sony Pictures Television, where they were President and Co-President of the studio’s nonfiction arm. It marks the pair’s first sale since going independent.

Weight To Date is a “dating format that follows singles during and after extreme weight loss as they navigate dating, identity, and the search for lasting love”.

The project is more in the soft format space, more akin to Indian Matchmaking, the IPC-produced series that ran for three seasons on Netflix, which followed Sima Taparia, a marriage consultant from Mumbai.

It is essentially a docu-format, which will follow around ten to twelve people, some of whom have lost an extraordinary amount of weight and after re-examining their own identity are looking for love and are back on the dating scene. In that regard, it has similarities to Love on the Spectrum, the Netflix series that has won seven Emmys, including the award for Outstanding Unstructured Reality Program, twice.

The topic is clearly in the zeitgeist and has been explored across a number of TikTok videos, particularly relevant since the growth of GLP1s.

Holzman and Saidman exec produce the series alongside Jeanne Begley.

It also marks the latest non-scripted series for Netflix, which has been on something on a buying spree lately. Deadline broke the news of The Leftovers, from Jersey Shore producer SallyAnn Salsano, which follows a group of friends from the Garden State, and Arizona Hot, from Banijay’s Brightspot Content, which follows friends from the Grand Canyon State.