Published: July 07, 2023| 06:18 PM

Tibor Bánóczki and Sarolta Szabó spent seven years making the animated dystopian sci-fi White Plastic Sky as the scriptwriters, film directors and directors of photography. Their detailed picture of a dead world may remind us of the classic Blade Runner, while the richly portrayed landscapes resemble Hayao Miyazaki’s films. In fact, the creators based their film on Ancient Greek myths and the American film Soylent Green.

In 2123, Hungarians live under a huge plastic dome, isolated from the outside world, where all animals and plants are extinct. Yet, people pay a cruel prize for their survival: once turned fifty, everyone must sacrifice their life to be turned into a tree.

“When we started working on the film in 2015, the world was quite different from today. The Covid-19 pandemics and the Ukrainian war actually brought it closer to our dystopian plot,” Bánóczki explained to the audience after the screening. “Looking at the situation in Hungary, it seems to be building its own invisible dome of a sort, isolating it from the outside world and Europe." The distinctive film was presented in the Horizons section at KVIFF.