Sustainable Nostalgia to Dystopian Future: Toward a Tropical Transnational Ecocinema in Mekong 2030

In recent commercial films and TV series about the Mekong River,­­ depictions of natural landscapes tend to be associated with past stories and settings incorporating tropical aesthetics and poetic countryside. Although likewise presenting a nostalgia for the Mekong, the art-house film anthology Mekong 2030 (2020) intersects the green past with dystopian futures. A project of the Luang Prabang Film Festival, this anthology brought together five directors representing the Mekong countries of Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and Thailand. By analyzing Mekong 2030 from the perspectives of sustainable nostalgia (ecological nostalgia) and critical memory studies, this paper evaluates the representation of the Mekong River in popular culture. In contrast to mainstream films, in the Mekong 30 project, the issue of evoking eco-memory (through landscapes, traditions, heritage, etc.) is not to reassure or lull viewers but, on the contrary, to awaken eco-emotions/eco-awareness and contribute to promoting ecological action. From an anthology consistently sharing the same approach from five different personal and national perspectives, this essay identifies the potential of a tropical transnational ecocinema that will contribute to solving the increasingly tense environmental problems of the Mekong during this era of both climatic and environmental impacts and the explosion of global media and visual culture.