White Plastic Sky

Becoming one with nature takes a dystopian turn in this visionary rotoscoped romance.

A hundred years from now, humankind has made a desperate bargain with a degraded Earth: at the age of 50, every citizen must transform into a tree to feed the next generation. Grieving her dead son, 32-year-old Nora has volunteered for an early ‘implantation’ – and upon learning this, her husband Stefan embarks on a quest to save her. But when everyone’s survival relies on radical symbiosis, a love like Stefan’s can be seen as selfish and short-sighted. Perhaps he can no longer see the forest for one particular tree.

The ethical questions of Soylent Green are presented in a new light in the Berlinale Encounters–premiering White Plastic Sky, an imaginative collaboration between writer/designer/directors Sarolta Szabó and Tibor Bánóczki (Milk Teeth, MIFF 2008). The rotoscope animation technique seen in Waking Life, A Scanner Darkly (MIFF 2006) and The Spine of Night (MIFF 2021) here conjures a dreamlike future world whose stunning aesthetic echoes the monumental brutalism of communist and fascist Hungary. The seed it plants in the viewer is provocative: what if the most humane choice is to surrender our humanity?