We’re stoked to share that our peatland restoration documentary The Living Layer has been named the Overall Winner of the 2026 Edinburgh Conservation Film Festival.
The ECFF is a flagship event within the Edinburgh Science Festival, the UK’s largest science festival, which has been running since 1989 and draws thousands of visitors to Edinburgh each spring. Being recognised as an award winning documentary production studio within a programme that sits alongside world-class scientific debate, exhibitions, and discussions makes this one feel particularly special.
About the Film
The Living Layer tells the story of peatland restoration across Cornwall, Dartmoor, and Exmoor through the work of the South West Peatland Partnership (SWPP). The partnership is a £13 million collaborative project bringing together more than 20 organisations — including South West Water, Natural England, the Duchy of Cornwall, the National Trust, and Cornwall Council — to restore over 2,600 hectares of degraded peatland in the UK’s South West.
Peatlands are extraordinary landscapes. They store more carbon than all the world’s forests combined, filter water, reduce flooding, support rare wildlife from dunlin to dragonflies, and preserve thousands of years of archaeological history in their layers. But decades of drainage, peat cutting, and land reclamation have left the majority of the UK’s peatlands damaged and releasing greenhouse gases rather than locking carbon away.
The film follows the people doing the hands-on work of reversing that damage — the restoration teams, monitoring officers, farmers, and scientists who are rewetting dried moorland, blocking drainage channels, and creating the conditions for sphagnum moss, cotton grasses, and bog habitats to slowly come back to life. Over 5,000 hectares have already had restoration works carried out, but there’s still so much more to do.
What the Judges Said
The ECFF judges praised the film for the way it makes an unfamiliar landscape feel urgent and alive:
“A film which takes on the challenging task of characterising peatland to grab and keep your interest; which it does with beautifully shot images, blended with explanatory graphics. You are left loving this vital landscape, having been in the company of those who restore the habitat whom tell the story to camera superbly.”
That last line means a lot to us. The heart of this film was always the people — the SWPP team who live and breathe this work every day. We wanted to let them tell their own story, and the judges clearly felt that come through.
About the Edinburgh Conservation Film Festival
The ECFF was founded by Edinburgh Conservation Science (ECoS), a consortium of world-class Scottish research organisations including the National Museums Scotland, the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, NatureScot, and the University of Edinburgh. The festival is a core part of the wider Edinburgh Science Festival programme, which in 2026 runs under the theme Going Global — showcasing research and innovation created through international partnerships that address shared global challenges, aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
The festival screens short conservation films from around the world, followed by a panel discussion on the role of storytelling in inspiring environmental restoration, and a prize-giving ceremony. It’s a brilliant platform for films that are trying to do more than just look beautiful — films that want to change how people think about the natural world.
A Growing Festival Run
This is the first festival award for The Living Layer, and it’s already been selected for multiple other festivals including Conservation Without Borders. The film is also set to be shown at the Chelsea Flower Show this May, with a subsequent pop-up screening at St Pancras — a testament to the growing reach and resonance of the SWPP’s story.
For our team at Here Now Film, conservation and environmental storytelling has always been central to what we do. From our award-winning ecological documentary Bio Estrela in Portugal (CINEECO Best Landscape) to our year-long peatland project with SWPP, we believe deeply in the power of film to connect people with the landscapes and causes that matter most.
Watch the Film
You can watch The Living Layer on the South West Peatland Partnership YouTube channel.
A huge thank you to the SWPP team — particularly Justine Read and everyone across the partnership — for trusting us to tell this story. And to Dr Simon Dures and the ECFF for creating a festival that genuinely champions conservation filmmaking.
Here’s to more stories, more restored peatland, and more reasons to feel hopeful about the landscapes we share.
