In an era marked by climate crisis, biodiversity loss, and environmental injustice, cinema has become a critical medium for imagining, narrating, and contesting ecological futures. This seminar invites papers that examine eco-cinema comparatively, attending to how environmental films circulate, transform, and resonate across geopolitical and cultural contexts. By placing works from diverse cinematic traditions into conversation, we aim to illuminate shared narrative strategies as well as distinctive aesthetic, political, and cultural approaches to environmental storytelling.

We seek to explore how genre operates as a transnational yet locally inflected framework for representing ecological crisis. How do eco-thrillers, climate dystopias, indigenous-led documentaries, activist films, and slow cinema engage differently with environmental issues across postcolonial, settler-colonial, and industrialized contexts? What happens when Hollywood’s spectacular disaster narratives are placed alongside more intimate, observational, or community-based approaches from global cinema? How do genre conventions shift across linguistic, national, and ideological borders, and how do these shifts reshape the emotional and political force of environmental narratives?

The seminar also considers Hollywood’s influence on global eco-cinema, from its framing of climate change as apocalyptic spectacle to its impact on global markets, aesthetics, and production models. At the same time, we invite attention to cinematic counter-flows: how filmmakers from the Global South, Indigenous communities, and other marginalized contexts resist, transform, or challenge dominant environmental narratives through alternative modes of representation.

Documentary filmmaking is central to these conversations. From films documenting communities on environmental frontlines to activist projects addressing land, extraction, and climate justice, documentaries negotiate questions of testimony, advocacy, and representation. How do documentary practices vary across regions, and how do they mediate between local experiences and global environmental discourse?

We welcome contributions engaging questions of cinematic form and genre, transnational circulation, environmental justice, Indigenous and decolonial filmmaking, and the ethics of representing ecological crisis. Through comparative approaches, this seminar seeks to map the diverse cinematic imaginaries shaping our ecological present while exploring the futures envisioned across cultures and borders.