Screening the Baltic Sea. A Sustainable Regioscape in the (Film-)Making

• In Event: Reimagining the Baltic Sea in Cultural Productions

Abstract

The vast Baltic Sea region is defined by substantial social and economic inequalities resulting from different political histories of the nine countries surrounding the sea. The Nordic countries’ Eastern European neighbors, marked by ecological devastation resulting from Soviet
militarization, industrialization, and man-induced disasters such as Chernobyl (1986), tend to
embody the great ecological ‘Other’ in the Scandinavian cultural – including cinematic and
audiovisual – imagination (Mrozewicz 2018; 2020). Nordic countries, on the contrary, perceive
themselves and are globally perceived as environmental forerunners. In 2022, Swedish regional screen production funds launched a digital tool to guide the filming in their respective regions and thus to comply with UN’s global sustainability targets. But are these standards met when Scandinavian screen productions are outsourced to Baltic neighbors? In Lithuania, the number of foreign screen productions has been rapidly growing since 2014, when the country’s parliament introduced a generous tax incentive scheme. Most of these productions are Scandinavian. In my talk, I will present the early stages of my current research project, focusing on the audiovisual mediations of the Baltic Sea from an environmental humanities perspective, and discuss some of the environmental aspects of the runaway productions of Scandinavian films and TV series in Lithuania.

Author

• Anna Estera Mrozewicz, Lund University