Urban Denial and Ecological Reality: Gaganachari as a Warning from the Future

Peer-Reviewed
The Criterion

The Criterion: An International Journal in English ISSN: 0976-8165

Open Access

Film & Literature

Urban Denial and Ecological Reality: Gaganachari as a Warning from the Future

Amjad Khan A, Dr. P. Sasi Ratnaker
Volume / Issue
Vol. 17, Issue 1 · February 2026

Pages
802-826

Article ID
2026V17N1078

Abstract

The Malayalam-language science fiction mockumentary Gaganachari interferes with the modern ecocritical discourse by revealing urban denial the ideological notion that technological advancement will envelop human communities against ecological disaster. The film, which is set in a climate-stricken future, redefines the urban areas of Kerala as precarious areas characterized by the infrastructural instability, the lack of resources and ecological blindness. With the background of urban ecocriticism and the Anthropocene theory, Gaganachari reveals the critique of anthropocentric development, and this paper explores this aspect in terms of submerged landscapes, weakening infrastructure, rationed resources, and socially disintegrated by climate consequences. Its mockumentary structure destroys the distinction between imaginative futures and current realities and turns satire into a practice of ecological witnessing. The alien figures at the core of this criticism are posthuman observers and displaced subjects of the ecology that disrupt human exceptionalism and bear histories of extraction and depletion of the planet. Instead of providing redemption, the movie is the sequential story of rejection and exploitation, which ultimately shapes the urban modernity as unsustainable ecologically and morally in the Anthropocene.

Keywords

Urban EcocriticismAnthropocene CinemaUrban DenialEcological CollapsePosthuman WitnessingInfrastructure Failure.

Article History

Received
29-01-2026
Accepted
18 February 2026
Published Online
3 February 2026

How to Cite

Amjad Khan A, Dr. P. Sasi Ratnaker. “Urban Denial and Ecological Reality: Gaganachari as a Warning from the Future.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, vol. 17, no. 1, Feb. 2026, pp. 802-826. ISSN: 0976-8165. DOI: https://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n1.55

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