Eden and Eastern European Ecocinema

Abstract

The rise of the ecological point of view in Eastern European societies is undoubtedly one of the defining trends of the early 21st century, generating continuous changes in all fields of life, from agricultural production to consumption habits to contemporary visual culture. We are witnessing a gradual but large-scale cultural transformation, the understanding of which is a major challenge for contemporary academic research. In this paper, I will attempt to understand these changes in the field of film culture: I will examine to what extent the rise of the ecocritical approach is something new in Hungarian filmmaking, to what extent it draws on established film traditions, and in what respect it rewrites the established procedures and approaches of local filmmaking traditions. The starting point for my investigation is Ágnes Kocsis’s film Eden (Éden 2020), which can be considered as the first eco-feature-film in Hungarian. A comparison of Eden with Kocsis’s previous feature films highlights the cinematic effects and consequences of this new approach, as well as the way in which our changing understanding of the relationship between human beings and the biosphere may be transforming the practice of filmmaking.