Client: Ecotrust – Genre: Documentary
Where trees become livelihoods.
Celebrating 25 years of EcoTrust Uganda
ECOTRUST — the Environmental Conservation Trust of Uganda — came to us with a quarter-century of proof and no definitive film of it. The brief? build an evergreen suite that could carry their story for the next decade, for every audience at once.
This wasn’t a single video. It was suite built to answer every question; a flagship hero film to move hearts, three programme films to explain the work, a long-form documentary built to withstand scrutiny, and a social layer to travel. All of it shot in one intensive field production across Uganda, then cut, reviewed and refined with the client over the following year.
And the subject was genuinely hard: carbon finance. Ex-ante credits, Plan Vivo certification, aggregation, revenue splits. Our job was to make it clear without making it small, and to keep the farmers, not the mechanism, at the centre of the story.
How a tonne of carbon
becomes a school fee.
Trees for Global Benefit (TGB) is ECOTRUST’s flagship: a cooperative carbon scheme, certified under Plan Vivo, that links smallholder farmers to the voluntary market. Understanding it was the first job of the production — because you can’t film what you can’t explain.
What was at stake? Around 70% of Uganda’s land is farmed, 80% of that by smallholders — and deforestation, driven largely by agriculture, is the country’s biggest source of emissions. Any answer has to work with the people who hold the land.
Visioning
Farmers map their land and set a plan — a land-use plan that doubles as a business plan, plus a shared vision for the whole community.
Specification
ECOTRUST specifies each activity against proven methodologies and quantifies the carbon it will capture.
Credits, up front
Plan Vivo issues certificates ex-ante – paid in advance — because the biggest barrier to planting trees is having the money to wait for them.
Aggregation
Thousands of smallholdings are bundled together, reaching a market scale no single farmer could reach alone.
60% to the land
Six of every ten dollars go straight to the people managing the land; the rest builds the training and social capital around them.
EcoTrusts journey in Numbers
33 → 50,000
farmers, over twenty years
2M+
tonnes of verified emission reductions each year
$10M
raised annually for participating communities
60¢/$
reaching communities directly as cash
THE FILMS
One Series. Three different audiences.
A flagship film to move all audiences, programme films to explain, a documentary to withstand scrutiny, and
a social layer to see the peoples whose lives it changes. Every piece cut from three weeks in the field.
Film 01 – Flagship
The ECOTRUST Hero Film
Twenty-five years of a simple, radical idea: that a forest survives only when the people beside it thrive.
The anchor of the suite. An inspiring overview of ECOTRUST’s mission and its blended-finance model, built to leave funders, donors and partners sure of the mission and hopeful for what comes next.
- A finance story told through people first, mechanism second.
- Interviews spanning leadership, field staff and participating farmers.
- Drone and handheld landscape work across five landscapes, from the Albertine rift to the Rwenzoris.
Film 02 – Program
Trees for Global Benefit
Carbon offsetting done properly… and what it looks like from inside a farmer’s own hectare.
The flagship programme, end to end. How a farmer joins, plans, plants and gets paid, and why the credit arriving before the trees mature is the whole point.
- The full process filmed for real: visioning workshops, planting, growth measurement, verification, payment.
- Farmer-led storytelling and the mechanism explained by the people it serves.
- Built to work as an event film and a warm-audience explainer alike.
Film 03 – Program
The Budongo-Bugoma Corridor & Biocredits
If carbon can pay for trees, can biodiversity pay for the forest between them?
ECOTRUST’s next frontier: restoring the corridor between two great chimpanzee forests, financed by an emerging class of biodiversity credits. A harder question, filmed honestly…. why would a landowner set land aside for nature, and what makes that choice rational?
- Camera traps, acoustic monitors and community transect walks filmed in the field.
- The incentive question asked directly to the people designing the answer.
This pilot grew into a six-film suite for IIED across Uganda & Zambia
Film 04 – Program
The Land Trust
Land held in trust, from the snowline dow: where science, tourism and conservation can be found under one roof.
ECOTRUST’s quieter programme: conservation land holdings from the Rwenzori gateway outward, sustaining themselves through ecotourism and research.
- Ecotourism, the snow lodge and scientific fieldwork brought into one narrative.
- The suite’s most landscape-driven film — space to breathe, built for the big screen.
“I just had a look at the latest versions of the films — they’re looking
really good! Both engaging and informative.”
Jonah Butsatsa — Project Lead, ECOTRUST
Work with us
Planning a film about complex work, far from home?
We make films about climate, conservation and the people doing the hardest work on Earth, with the consent, permits, partnerships and patience that work deserves.