Greg MacGillivray, Local Filmmaker, Honored with Wildlife Festival's Lifetime Achievement Award

Greg MacGillivray

​Greg MacGillivray and Jim Freeman founded MacGillivray Freeman Films in the mid-1960s, and the Laguna Beach-based company has been making large-format films, documentaries on the natural world mostly, ever since.

Freeman was tragically killed in a Sierra Nevada helicopter crash in 1976, but MacGillivray kept his partner's name in the company title as a memorial. Two-time Oscar nominee MacGillivray was honored with the International Wildlife Film Festival (IWFF) Lifetime Achievement Award for Media in Missoula, Montana, recently.

MacGillivray Freeman Films

Greg MacGillivray on location in Fiji.

​"Greg MacGillivray and his team at MacGillivray Freeman Films have reached and inspired tens of millions of viewers with their award-winning IMAX films and have set the gold standard for giant-screen educational films that promote conservation," said Janet Rose, IWFF executive director, in presenting the award.

"The significance of this and the programming that MacGillivray Freeman Films produces is enormous because those programs can in many ways change the way we as humans view the world and the way we respond to critical conservation issues."

MacGillivray has produced and directed more than 30 award-winning IMAX Theatre films. He was nominated for Academy Awards in directing with The Living Sea in 1995 and Dolphins in 2000.

He was not the only one associated with MacGillivray Freeman Films honored at the IWFF. Chris Palmer, president of MacGillivray Freeman Films Educational Foundation and founder and director of the Center for Environmental Filmmaking at the School of Communication at American University in Washington, D.C, received the IWFF Wildlife Hero of the Year Award for his campaign to reform the wildlife filmmaking industry.

MacGillivray and his wife Barbara MacGillivray in 2004 founded the nonprofit MacGillivray Freeman Films Educational Foundation to promote the conservation of our natural and cultural heritage through giant screen films and companion educational programming.