This study, which concentrates on the portrayal of mythical sacred trees in American films and uses Mircea Eliade’s and Peter Berger’s investigations on sacred as a framework, is part of a field in which studies on religion and cinema intersect. Focusing on twenty-first-century American films, this study investigates how trees emerge as symbols of sacred in films in which the characters struggle with grief, pain, and meaninglessness because the reality of death or dying confronts them. As a symbol of regeneration, the sacred tree signifies the existence of a nonhomogenous vast transcendent cosmological schema and offers these characters a way to make sense of their suffering.

Evrim ERSÖZ KOÇ is an associate professor in the Department of American Culture and Literature at Dokuz Eylül University in Izmir, Turkey. She received her Ph.D. degree with a dissertation on the representations of apocalypse in contemporary American drama. Her research interests and publications mainly focus on American drama and American cinema.