1 REVIEW Ecocinema Theory and Practice, Stephen Rust, Salma Monani and Sean Cubitt (Eds) (2013) New York and Oxon: Routledge (AFI Film Reader), pp.vii-325, Paperback. ISBN: 978-0-415-89943-7 USD$36.95. Reviewed by Kiu-wai Chu For decades, film and media studies have been dominated by issues related to gender and sexuality, race and postcolonial studies, or globalization and transnationalism. Ecological and environmental issues, on the other hand, have long been an underplayed area of studies. It was not until recent years that the field of “ecocinema studies” began to expand in two major ways. First, there has been a shift of ecocritical analysis from western wildlife cinema to various genres of films produced globally; 1 and second, there is more systematic conceptualization and theorization of understanding of “ecocinema” and “eco-films”. With hindsight, efforts spent in the development of the field can now be seen in scholars’ works published in the last two decades. There is no better time for Rust, Monani and Cubitt to present their edited anthology Ecocinema Theory and Practice as a more comprehensive introduction to the field. With essays written by pioneering and emerging scholars, the collection both sketches the development of ecocinema studies over the past two decades and offer much-needed new theoretical frameworks for expanding and defining ecocinema studies. Contributors to the volume have proposed various theoretical approaches that expand the field towards multiple directions of investigations – including Scott MacDonald’s theorization of a specific kind of ecocinema that facilitates a retraining of spectator’s perception; David Ingram’s cognitivist approach towards defining a more pluralistic eco-aesthetics applicable to different film genres; Andrew Hageman’s dialectical ideological critiques to expose that all films are bathed in conflicting ideologies; and Adrian Ivakhiv’s process-relational perspective that examines the film 1 This can be seen in Sheldon Lu and Jiayan Mi’s anthology Chinese ecocinema: In the Age of Environmental Challenge (2009), and Pietari Kaapa and Tommy Gustafsson’s forthcoming collection Transnational Ecocinema: Film Culture in An Era of Ecological Transformation (Forthcoming, 2013).More broadly, Ecocinema Theory and Practice has compiled a useful and extensive, if not exhaustive, list of recommended readings for the field of ecocinema studies between 1990s to 2013. (pp.297-313).