Annual Top Films Lists

Top 200 Most Anticipated Foreign Films of 2023: #176. Tibor Bánóczki & Sarolta Szabó’s White Plastic Sky

Published on January 6, 2023

White Plastic Sky

With an earlier track record that includes Sundance short Les Conquerants in ’12 and Clermont-Ferrand’s Leftover ’16, Hungarian filmmaker tandem Tibor Bánóczki and Sarolta Szabó moved into features with White Plastic Sky – an animated film described as a dystopian eco-fantasy. There’ll be 2D and 3D and rotoscoping involved but what is uber cool is that the filmmakers got help from geologists, botanists and meteorologists to write the screenplay. A young couple living in a barren, post-apocalyptic Budapest in the year 2121, struggle for food and life. This is a co-production between Hungarian Salto Films (Orsolya Sipos and József Fülöp) and Slovakian Artichoke (Juraj Krasnohorsky).

Gist: At the age of 50, they are implanted with a special seed turning them into a tree that will provide oxygen and food for the community. A young man, Stefan, supports this system until the day his wife Nora gives her life up for voluntary implantation. Driven by his love, Stefan decides to break the rules of this society in order to save her.

Release Date/Prediction: Always difficult to pinpoint when such an oeuvre might be ready but we could see this land at a major film festival.

Eric Lavallée

Eric Lavallée is the founder, CEO, editor-in-chief, film journalist and critic at IONCINEMA.com (founded in 2000). Eric is a regular at Sundance, Cannes and TIFF. He has a BFA in Film Studies at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema. In 2013 he served as a Narrative Competition Jury Member at the SXSW Film Festival. He was an associate producer on Mark Jackson's This Teacher (2018 LA Film Festival, 2018 BFI London). In 2022 he served as a New Flesh Comp for Best First Feature at the 2022 Fantasia Intl. Film Festival. Current top films for 2022 include Tár (Todd Field), All That Breathes (Shaunak Sen), Aftersun (Charlotte Wells).