About the Film
For the past four decades, Ken Smith has lived alone in the Scottish Highlands. His home is a log cabin nestled near Loch Treig, known as "the lonely loch." Ken has no electricity or running water — he lives off the land, fishes for his supper, chops wood, and even brews his own alcohol. Filmed over 10 years, director Lizzie Mackenzie poetically captures Ken's profound, spiritual relationship with the wilderness.
As Ken likes to say, “if you love the land, it loves you back.”
Now in his 70s, Ken reflects upon the reasons he turned his back on society, the vulnerability of old age, and the wonder of a life lived in nature in this humorous, transcendent and life-affirming BAFTA Award-winning feature documentary.
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LIZZIE MACKENZIE
DIRECTOR, and CINEMATOGRAPHER, CO-PRODUCER
Lizzie MacKenzie is a self-shooting director-producer from the Scottish Highlands with a sensitive, gentle and playful approach to exploring human and non-human existence at the edges of (human) society. Her debut feature film, The Hermit of Treig, has won numerous awards both in the UK and internationally, including a Scottish BAFTA in November 2022. Lizzie’s work has been showcased as part of the British Film Institute’s The Camera Is Ours: Britain’s Pioneering Women Documentary Makers. Her second feature film, currently in development, explores the subject of domestication and the wild soul.
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NAOMI SPIRO
PRODUCER
Naomi Spiro is a BAFTA winning Producer based in Scotland. Her last film Netflix’s “Stamped from the Beginning” was shortlisted for an Oscar. Her feature film “The Hermit of Treig” (2022) won a BAFTA Scotland for best documentary. Other credits include “Katrina: Come Hell & HIgh Water” (2025), “Cancel Karen Dunbar” (2021) and “Spit It Out”(2019) for BBC Scotland and “Abstract: The Art of Design” and “Team Foxcatcher” for Netflix. Prior to producing, she was an award winning editor with credits including “Remote Control”, “Skin”, “Pictures from Afghanistan” (BBC Scotland), and “Eugenics” (BBC Four) and “The Common Riding” (BBC Two).
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ROBBIE FRASER
EXECUTIVE PRODUCER
Robbie Fraser is an award winning director, writer and producer, working in scripted and unscripted TV and film. Robbie’s most recent broadcast includes “Pictures from the Ukraine” (2022), “Pictures from Iraq”, (2021) and “Pictures from Afghanistan” (2020) all for BBC Scotland with international sales representation by Terranoa. His cinema films include “Final Ascent” (2019) about legendary Scottish mountaineer Hamis MacInnes, “Family Goldmine” (2015), and “Hamish” (2016), a documentary portrait of the Scottish poet, WW2 soldier, bisexual, cultural anthropologist and ‘animateur’ Hamish Henderson. Always up for adventure, he’s shot in the Ukraine, Mali, Iraq and Afghanistan and has trained with the BBC’s High Risk Team.
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AMY HARDIE
EXECUTIVE PRODUCER
Amy Hardie is a documentary filmmaker with several international awards. She set up the Scottish Documentary Institute in 2004 with Noe Mendelle, and Docspace, dedicated to increasing an audience for serious documentaries. After making 12 prime time television documentaries for BBC and Channel 4, her debut feature The Edge of Dreaming opened at IDFA, followed by a science feature, Stem Cell Revolutions, the innovative Seven Songs for a Long Life (2015), and Love & Trouble, which had its world premiere in Berlin Documentale in 2024. Her films have won 13 awards, translated into 14 languages, have screened in 16 countries including on PBS in the US, Arte in Europe, VPRO in the Netherlands, BBC and Channel 4 in UK.
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LING LEE
EDITOR
Ling Lee is an award-winning documentary director and editor, as well as a lecturer of Film and Moving Image at the Edinburgh College of Art in the postgraduate department. Her work focuses on crossover cultures, experimental film techniques, and the ways in which film can convey cinematic, human stories.
After gaining an MA in Documentary Directing at the National Film & TV School she made films in the UK and abroad. Ling’s work has been broadcast on TV channels across the world such as BBC, Al Jazeera, ARTE/ZDF and VPRO, and screened at international film festivals such as IDFA and TIFF. She has won a number of awards including a One World Media Award, BAFTA Scotland and an Edinburgh International Film Festival Trailblazer Award.
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KIERAN GOSNEY
EDITOR
Kieran Gosney is a documentary editor based in Scotland, with credits including Time Trial, The Hermit of Treig, A Cat Called Dom. Kieran worked worked on the feature documentaries Donkeyote (2017), Time Trial (2017), and Nae Pasaran (2018). He edited Time Trial, for which he won the best editing award at the Riverrun International Film Festival alongside his co-editor Dino Jonsäter. Following this, he edited a number of short and feature documentaries, shorts include the award winning films Crannog (2018) and My Name is Anik (2019), as well as features like The Hermit of Treig (2021) which won the BAFTA Scotland award for Best Documentary, and A Cat Called Dom (2022) which won the award for best film at the 2022 Edinburgh International Film Festival. He is currently editing a number of documentaries in various stages of production, including Cyclovia directed by Finlay Pretsell and Wolf Park directed by Demelza Kooij.