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Paper short abstract

This paper explores contemporary Italian cinema as econarrative. Films like The Wonders, Happy as Lazzaro, and Small Body use landscapes and mythologies to address ecological crisis and eco-anxiety, showing ecology as both narrative form and mode of identity and belonging.

Paper long abstract

Contemporary Italian cinema has increasingly responded to the ecological crisis by creating narratives that interweave environment, memory, and identity. Films such as Le meraviglie (The Wonders, Alice Rohrwacher, 2014), Lazzaro felice (Happy as Lazzaro, Rohrwacher, 2018), and Piccolo corpo (Small Body, Laura Samani, 2021) place their stories in fragile rural ecologies and peripheral communities, where landscapes are not passive settings but active agents in shaping belonging. These works function as econarratives that illuminate the material, psychological, and philosophical dimensions of ecological collapse.

Drawing on concepts from climate psychology, they reflect emotions such as eco-anxiety (Clayton, 2020), solastalgia (Albrecht, 2005), and ecological grief (Cunsolo & Ellis, 2018). By dramatizing disrupted agrarian traditions, broken seasonal cycles, and endangered livelihoods, these films embody collective feelings of loss, displacement, and mourning while simultaneously imagining resilience and coexistence. They also activate deeper symbolic registers: archetypal imagery and folk mythologies—cycles of fertility, death, and renewal—that Jungian psychology interprets as expressions of the collective unconscious. In this way, ecological crisis emerges as both planetary wound and psychic rupture.

Philosophically, these cinematic econarratives resonate with phenomenological approaches (Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty), where identity and dwelling are inseparable from environment, and with eco-psychology (Roszak, 1992), which views ecological devastation as fragmentation of the self. Italian films thus become imaginative laboratories in which ecology is translated into narrative form and psychic landscape, enabling the (re)negotiation of identity. By foregrounding entangled eco-cultural belonging, they destabilize dichotomies such as nature/culture and human/n