“There is no Border” – Dissolving boundaries between precarious bodies and rural landscapes in Frozen River (2008)

The chapter examines Courtney Hunt’s Oscar-nominated debut feature Frozen River (2008) and argues that the film displays an interactive, unbounded understanding of rural landscape. The film is discussed as a case study belonging to a recent, loosely connected cycle of US indie films which concern themselves with rural poverty and marginality. The cycle’s emergence is inherently connected to the dramatic exacerbation of multi-factored real-life experiences of poverty and precarity in rural America since the 2008 financial crisis and, more recently, the Covid-19 pandemic, yet also hark back to much older experiences of oppression and dispossession. I have elsewhere termed this cycle New Rural Cinema. (Vgl. Lindemann 2024) This term reflects not only the cycle’s recent emergence around the 2010s, yet also its novel, substantive approach to landscape which stands in contrast with much of Hollywood’s historical treatment of rural America.