Re-map the Landscape
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PATHFINDER PRIZE VOTING HAS CLOSED. FIND OUT THE WINNERS AT “THE REBEL REEF” PREMIERE!
Hidden Compass offers an annual grant of $18,000 to fund a team of curious modern explorers and filmmakers, support them on their cinematic expedition, and premiere their film at a movie theater in California. Our Pathfinders are multimedia storytellers who bring our community behind the scenes in digital dispatches, and share their journey through magazine features and a short documentary film.
Hidden Compass Allies, thank you for voting! The winners will be announced in person at the 2025 Ethos of Exploration event on Saturday, December 6, at the New Parkway Theater in Oakland, California. The event features the world-wide premiere of this year’s Pathfinder documentary, “The Rebel Reef” — as well as an amazing program. There will be a Q&A with the filmmakers, an immersive VR dive experience, a violin performance by Emmy-nominated composer Chad Cannon, a reception with the Pathfinders, and more! Allies attend free.
Keep scrolling to meet the 2026 Pathfinder finalist teams …
Pathfinder Finalists
When the River Stopped Singing: An Investigation of Hydropower and Corruption in the Himalayas
An investigative expedition to the Himalayas to ask the following questions: How do renewable energy projects, designed to power a modern world, collide with communities whose relationship with their landscape spans millennia? What do we sacrifice in pursuit of progress? Nepali journalist and filmmaker Tulsi Rauniyar leads the expedition to go where roads cannot reach. There, she and the film’s director join members of the Indigenous Bhote Singsa — one of the world’s least documented peoples — to profile a river and community threatened by hydropower and corruption.
Barnaby Francis
Director, Producer, and Media Strategist
Lhakpa Angjuk Bhote
Community Liaison and Legal Strategist
Karma Bhutia
Community Liaison and Cultural Expert
About the Expedition
When the River Stopped Singing: An Investigation of Hydropower and Corruption in the Himalayas
Tulsi Rauniyar
Barnaby Francis
Director, Producer, and Media Strategist
Lhakpa Angjuk Bhote
Community Liaison and Legal Strategist
Karma Bhutia
Community Liaison and Cultural Expert
View full proposal here.
On a cold winter night in 2022, in eastern Nepal, Lhakpa Bhote settled onto a rug in his small stone house, stretched his legs, and, as he had every night for forty-two years, fell asleep to the gushing of the Chhujung River. It had been the soundtrack to his life — his first memory as a child, the lullaby that soothed him through seasons of sowing and harvesting. But at three in the morning, rumbling thuds began to overpower the river’s melody. Lhakpa, whose family has tended these mountain pastures for more than a millennium, sprang from his bed and stepped outside to find bulldozers crumbling the stone walls that protected his house and land.
The Bhote Singsa are one of the world’s least documented peoples. They hold ways of understanding the natural world that remain virtually unknown beyond their borders. In our documentary, we will explore what happens when their worldviews encounter modern development, like the hydropower plant that threatens Lhakpa’s home. That project currently operates across 1,800 hectares, 90 times larger than the 20-hectare site described in the project’s environmental impact assessment.
Cinematography will expose the staggering scale of encroachment, the gap between a 20-hectare permit and a 1,800-hectare reality.
About the Expedition
An investigative expedition to the Himalayas to ask the following questions: How do renewable energy projects, designed to power a modern world, collide with communities whose relationship with their landscape spans millennia? What do we sacrifice in pursuit of progress? Nepali journalist and filmmaker Tulsi Rauniyar leads the expedition to go where roads cannot reach. There, she and the film’s director join members of the Indigenous Bhote Singsa — one of the world’s least documented peoples — to profile a river and community threatened by hydropower and corruption.
About the Team
- Tulsi Rauniyar will be the expedition leader, storyteller, and filmmaker
- Barnaby Francis will be the director, producer, and media strategist
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Lhakpa Angjuk Bhote will be a community liaison and legal strategist
- Karma Bhutia will be a community liaison and cultural expert
Expedition Deliverables
- A short documentary film that centers the voices of the Indigenous Bhote Singsa
- A portfolio of photographs and magazine articles for publication in Hidden Compass
- Dispatches from the field during and after the expedition
Want to learn more about this expedition and help us decide the winner? Attend the virtual pitch event on October 21, 2025 from 6:00-7:15 p.m. PT. The event is free, but registration is required. Register here! If you can’t attend live, a recording will be available on the Pathfinder Prize page after the event.
*Voting for the 2026 Pathfinder Prize opens immediately following the pitch event on October 21 and closes and noon P.T. on October 31.
Stories We Tell: Rewriting the Script Through the Vision of a Black Mamba
A filmmaking expedition to flip the script by asking the following question: What if the most powerful stories are those communities tell about themselves? In Hluvukani, South Africa, Co-expedition Leader Nkateko Letti Mzimba — a filmmaker and a member of the Black Mambas, Africa’s first all-female anti-poaching unit — teams up with acclaimed producer and director Beki Henderson to create the first documentary about Hluvukani made by a member of that community. Nkateko’s lens reveals a future where conservation and community are inseparable.
Beki Henderson
Expedition Co-leader
Nkateko Letti Mzimba
Expedition Co-leader
About the Expedition
Stories We Tell: Rewriting the Script Through the Vision of a Black Mamba
Beki Henderson
Expedition Co-leader
Nkateko Letti Mzimba
Expedition Co-leader
View full proposal here.
Nkateko Letti Mzimba is a woman who walks two worlds at once: the wild frontlines of South Africa’s Greater Kruger as a member of the Black Mambas — Africa’s first all-female anti-poaching unit — and the heart of her village, Hluvukani. Life in Hluvukani is closely tied to the rhythms of the bush, people live with wildlife as both neighbor and threat. Growing up here, Nkateko saw how poverty and unemployment made communities vulnerable to the lure of poaching but also how deeply people cared for the land that sustains them.
For too long, remote communities like Hluvukani have seen their stories told through foreign lenses, shaped by perspectives that are not their own. This ground-breaking documentary flips the script to put the camera in the hands of Nkateko — a filmmaker who, in collaboration with award-winning producer and director Beki Henderson, will create the first documentary about Hluvukani community made by a member of the community.
It is not about outsiders curating a narrative to fit their own lens. It is about the protagonist telling their story from the inside out — offering their perspective on the struggles, triumphs, and everyday realities that shape their lives.
About the Expedition
A filmmaking expedition to flip the script by asking the following question: What if the most powerful stories are those communities tell about themselves? In Hluvukani, South Africa, Co-expedition Leader Nkateko Letti Mzimba — a filmmaker and a member of the Black Mambas, Africa’s first all-female anti-poaching unit — teams up with acclaimed producer and director Beki Henderson to create the first documentary about Hluvukani made by a member of that community. Nkateko’s lens reveals a future where conservation and community are inseparable.
About the Team
- Beki Henderson will be the expedition co-leader
- Nkateko Letti Mzimba will be the expedition co-leader and filmmaker
Expedition Deliverables
- A short documentary film co-created by Beki Henderson and Nkateko Letti Mzimba, and in collaboration with the Hluvukani community
- A range of supporting content — including feature articles, behind-the-scenes materials, and a tailored social media strategy — that explores what it means to shift traditional filmmaking structures toward shared authorship
- A podcast episode focused on the behind-the-scenes journey — offering an honest reflection on what it means to hand over narrative control, build trust, and challenge the conventional roles of filmmaker and subject
- Dispatches from the field during and after the expedition
Want to learn more about this expedition and help us decide the winner? Attend the virtual pitch event on October 21, 2025 from 6:00-7:15 p.m. PT. The event is free, but registration is required. Register here! If you can’t attend live, a recording will be available on the Pathfinder Prize page after the event.
*Voting for the 2026 Pathfinder Prize opens immediately following the pitch event on October 21 and closes and noon P.T. on October 31.
Cast Your Vote
Ready to vote for the next Pathfinder Prize? Once a vote is cast, it cannot be revoked or changed.
Become an Ally
As an Ally, you decide the winner — and follow them to the frontiers of exploration.
Meet the Advisory Panel
Jodi Cash
Writer + Documentary Filmmaker, 2024 Pathfinder Prize Finalist
Jodi Cash is writer and filmmaker on a quest for characters. Her work explores the relationship between people and place, and has been featured in The Bitter Southerner, Scalawag, Paste, Kinfolk, Hidden Compass, and Sirius XM’s Canada Talks: Native Traveler. She co-founded The Seed & Plate, which features stories about community, largely through the lens of sustainable agriculture.
In 2019, she published Concrete Jungle: A Foraged Fruit Cookbook, in collaboration with the Atlanta-based nonprofit of the same name. In 2024, she premiered her first documentary film, The Green Flash, which she produced and co-directed alongside her husband, Gresham Cash. It chronicles the life of a legendary pot smuggler, whom she wrote about in one of The Bitter Southerner’s Best Stories of 2016, “High Times and Low Tides at Reefer Beach.”
Originally from Atlanta, Jodi now splits time between her hometown and Paris.
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Sivani Babu
Co-founder / CEO
Sivani Babu is the co-founder and CEO of Hidden Compass. She is an award-winning journalist and nature photographer who has contributed to BBC Travel, CNN, Backpacker, Outdoor Photographer, Iron Horse Literary Review, and numerous other publications. Her work has been recognized in the Best American Travel Writing series and has appeared in exhibits from San Diego to the Sorbonne. Sivani graduated from the University of Chicago with three majors — economics, public policy studies, and political science — and one Lazarused newspaper, the Chicago Weekly News. At the University of Pennsylvania Law School, she taught high schoolers about their constitutional rights. As a Teach for America corps member, she taught eighth-graders about the tangency of math and literacy. After working on a Supreme Court case and representing hundreds of indigent criminal defendants, Sivani left her career as a federal public defender to sail across the most brutal sea on earth. Since then, she has chased storms through Tornado Alley, searched for polar bears in the Arctic Circle, and survived serious injury while celestially navigating the Bermuda Triangle. Sivani is working on her first book, Saving the Night: Shedding Light on the Importance of Darkness.
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Sabine K. Bergmann
Co-founder / COO
Sabine K. Bergmann is the co-founder and COO of Hidden Compass. As an award-winning travel, science, and nature writer, she has contributed stories to dozens of publications — including WIRED, Sierra Magazine, and The Best Travel Writing book series — with a collective readership of tens of millions of readers. Her writing has been featured in exhibitions throughout Europe, North Africa, and North America. As an editor, she has managed content for travel companies valued at more than $500 million. Sabine is a Stanford University-trained environmental researcher and community coordinator who has worked on conservation projects from the Amazon Basin to the Great Barrier Reef. In 2009, she represented Stanford University climate researchers at the United Nations. From 2011-2013, she was the co-host of a live-broadcast environmental radio show in Spanish with an audience of 100,000. She has interviewed sources at sea in a tropical storm, escaped political unrest in the Andes, and discovered cocaine-smuggling coverups in the Caribbean. She has also interviewed earthquake survivors and astrophysicists, mountain biked from the Andes to the Amazon, and chronicled oral traditions passed down through millennia of indigenous history. Headshot by In Her Image Photography. Learn more at www.sabinekbergmann.com.
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Sivani Babu
Co-founder/Co-CEO
Sivani Babu is the co-founder, co-CEO, and creative director of Hidden Compass. She is an award-winning journalist and nature photographer who has contributed to BBC Travel, CNN, Backpacker, Outdoor Photographer, Iron Horse Literary Review,and numerous other publications. Her work has been recognized in the Best American Travel Writing series and has appeared in exhibits from San Diego to the Sorbonne. Sivani graduated from the University of Chicago with three majors — economics, public policy studies, and political science — and one Lazarused newspaper, the Chicago Weekly News. At the University of Pennsylvania Law School, she taught high schoolers about their constitutional rights. As a Teach for America corps member, she taught eighth graders about the tangency of math and literacy. After working on a Supreme Court case and occasionally using unicorn metaphors to explain the realities of sentencing to hundreds of indigent criminal defendants, Sivani left her career as a federal public defender to sail across the most brutal sea on earth. Since then, she has chased storms through Tornado Alley, searched for polar bears in the Arctic Circle, and survived a broken neck and a concussion while sailing through a lightning storm in the Bermuda Triangle. Sivani is working on her first book, Saving the Night: Shedding Light on the Importance of Darkness.
Find your story.
Choose a Theme to Explore
Journey alongside characters in pursuit of elusive truths. Travel through extreme landscapes, to the far reaches of the planet, and into the unknown.
Get to know extraordinary characters from around the world — individuals, cultures, places, creatures, and even objects.
Investigate the relationship between humankind and the planet. Come face-to-face with Nature as an unpredictable danger, a wise teacher, and a precarious organism.
Delve into the dark and difficult aspects of a place, even when the darkness exists only in the narrator. Investigative pieces, historical exposés, and tales of narrators immersed in danger.
Inhabit the past, present, and future of a place. Unearth layers of ancient legends and traditions; probe the transient nature of the current moment; and venture out into prediction, peril, and possibility.
Photo: Dr. Gilad Fiskus
Photo: Sivani Babu
Photo: Kim F. Stone
Photo: Sivani Babu
Photo: Sugato Mukherjee
Photo: Geraint Rowland
Find your story.
Choose a Theme to Explore
Photo: Sivani Babu
01
Quest
Journey alongside characters in pursuit of elusive truths. Travel through extreme landscapes, to the far reaches of the planet, and into the unknown.
Photo: Sivani Babu