What is Ecofilm?

Ecofilm is intended to create awareness, appreciate interrelationality and encourage the viewer to act ecologically. It aims to establish an ecological social order based on biocentrism/ecocentrism. Whether ecocinema, in effect, is really capable of such a change might be questionable. However, theme is the most important aspect of an ecofilm. This will certainly include the process of conception of the theme, and its effective manifestation in an artistic yet educational manner.

The basis of ecofilm, as Adrian Ivakhiv (an ecofilm critic) puts it, is a reconciliation with the two disciplines, ecology and cinema, to the extent that it “requires an engagement with eco/cinema philosophy.” If the discipline of ecology identifies/studies/analyses/appreciates relationships between organisms or between organisms and their environments, cinema depicts it in its cinematic medium. The “depiction of reality” (Bill Nichols – a film critic) that is attributed to cinema might be contested, but a film critic would certainly agree that it has some amount of reality in it as Eskjaer Mikkel (a film critic) agrees: “Cinema offers a way of looking at the world. This way of looking is an observation of reality, being itself a part of the social world it observes.”