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Asif Kapadia’s genre-bending film 2073 is neither fact nor fiction, but billed as a warning for what’s to come. Still from 2073 trailer via NEON.
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Are We Headed for Ruin? There’s Gotta Be Another Way

Dystopian documentary films can’t be the only forecast for where we’re going.

A drone flies above the elevated motorways of a busy metropolis. The sky is orange and hazy.
Asif Kapadia’s genre-bending film 2073 is neither fact nor fiction, but billed as a warning for what’s to come. Still from 2073 trailer via NEON.
Dorothy Woodend 24 Jan 2025The Tyee

Dorothy Woodend is the culture editor for The Tyee.

In the past week, I’ve been thinking a lot about fear: living in the middle of it, combating it daily and, on a larger level, what being immersed in a simmering pool of anxiety, dread and low-level panic does, not only to individual humans, but to us as a wider society.

It’s not good. If my experience is any indication, it’s hard to concentrate when one’s brain keeps interrupting ordinary routine with random thoughts like “Should I learn how to shoot a machine gun?”

Hopefully none of these questions will require actual answers. Still, it’s a strange experience to even entertain them. But I guess that’s where we’re at, with the very stability of everyday life suddenly thrown into question.

If U.S. soldiers showed up on Vancouver streets, what would really happen? The brain bends and warps at the idea, but it speaks to the deeply strange tenor of the times that we’re living through that the idea even occurs.

The human capacity to imagine the end of the world is well established.

But as French film essayist Chris Marker once mused, history has far more imagination than people do. However hard we try to predict the outcome of events, both big and small, life’s real elements of surprise will always take us by surprise.

Marker’s film essay A Grin Without a Cat is useful to return to as we parse the current moment. He writes about the rise, fall and rise again of revolutionary moments. It’s a reminder that we’ve been here before — that nothing, good or bad, lasts forever.

In the churn of history, it’s often very hard to discern what’s actually going on as events are taking place.

“Some think the third world war will be set off by a nuclear missile,” Marker wrote in an essay about his work. “For me, that’s the way it will end. In the meantime, the figures of an intricate game are developing, a game whose decoding will give historians of the future — if they are still around — a very hard time.”

A recent genre-bending documentary called 2073 from U.K. director Asif Kapadia channels Marker’s most famous film La Jetée, a hybrid work that combines science fiction with cinema essay to offer something almost uncategorizable.

While it doesn’t reach the lofty heights of Marker’s work, 2073 is an interesting attempt to marry the future and the present through a convergence of fact and fiction.

In 2073, Samantha Morton plays Ghost, an anonymous interlocutor who functions as a Virgil-like guide to the ninth circle of hell that is the future. An undetermined incident called “the Event” has reduced civilization to a dystopic hellscape, the logical outcome of a long path of human-made destruction.

“How did we get here?” she asks. “How did we let that happen?” Then she proceeds to detail exactly why.

Trailer via NEON.

We brought this on ourselves

The film’s version of the future will be familiar to audiences from any number of Armageddon films, limited series and video games.

I’m reminded of The Last of Us, a limited television series based on the video game of the same name, and the dystopian movie The Day After Tomorrow.

The underlying message of all these narratives is always the same: something was bound to bring us down, and we brought this on ourselves through greed, hubris and general human fuckery.

In 2073, the ultra-rich live in shining towers, attended by armies of silent, attentive servants. Great masterworks of art casually grace the walls of their mega-mansions. For a few elites, obscene amounts of wealth and privilege continue to accrue while down in the ruins, the great mass of humanity ekes out a living, foraging through heaps of trash for anything they can eat, barter or use.

The white ceiling of an arboretum opens to a large funnel of water flowing down into a circular concrete pit below. Around it are lush green indoor vegetation and grey futuristic walkways.
The hybrid documentary 2073 considers democratic downfall alongside present-day commentary from journalists, environmentalists and politicians. Still from 2073 trailer via NEON.

The movie moves backwards and forwards in time, landing at critical inflection points like 2017 and 1997. In further fleshing out the possible avenues of democratic downfall, the film offers interviews with journalists, environmentalists and politicians who sketch out the current state of things.

It’s familiar stuff: from the dominating discourse offered by social media that spray-hosed lies in epic velocity to the queasy alliance between tech bros like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos and the new Trump administration.

But the United States isn’t the only country implicated in the film. The patterns are similar across the globe, whether it’s through Prime Minister Narendra Modi in India, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in Hungary or Rodrigo Duterte, the notorious former president of the Philippines.

Their techniques of suppressing the free press, oppressing marginalized groups and wielding fear like a sledgehammer will be familiar to those tracking current affairs in North America.

‘This could be the last film that I made’

In a December 2024 interview with Guardian journalist Carole Cadwalladr, who is featured in the film, director Kapadia said he was uncertain about the prospect of making a hybrid documentary like 2073.

“I honestly thought, I don’t know what this is, I don’t know what’s going on in the world, I don’t fully understand it, but part of me kept thinking, this could be the last film that I made. And when I started making it, a lot of the things that are happening right now in the world, hadn’t actually started then, right? But I just got this feeling, this is quite serious and heavy,” Kapadia told Cadwalladr.

“Generative AI didn’t exist when we started this film. Trump had just lost the election. Every American was saying: ‘Why do you have shots of him in the film? He’s finished, he’s old news. Everyone’s sick of him.’ And then by the time the film’s come out, he’s just won the election.”

The true heroes of the film are courageous journalists. Kapadia features the work of Cadwalladr, India’s Rana Ayyub, who was imprisoned for her work, and the Philippines’ Maria Ressa, who won a Nobel Prize (an honour that she shared with Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov).

All three journalists suffered torrents of abuse, threats of violence, rape and other assorted forms of brutal retaliation. But they continued to do their jobs, holding power to account, even at the risk of their own lives.

While it has lofty ambitions, 2073 overplays its hand, slathering footage of recent events with a thudding score that feels prescriptive and oppressive. The science fiction elements are better handled than the documentary aspects.

As Morton’s character dolefully recites, her fate, and by extension that of the rest of her world, is already sealed. Her testimony is meant to function as a warning, a missive to the past, telling us humans to do something while we still can.

“I hope someone finds this.... No one did anything to stop them. It’s too late for me. I was alone,” she says. “It may not be too late for you.”

Large airborne machines carry cargo-style containers above a vast landscape of trash against an orange, hazy sky.
Still from 2073 trailer via NEON.

How to locate a different future

We, the current crop, don’t seem all that terribly motivated. In this fashion, the film falls victim to something I like to call “PDTS,” or “post-documentary traumatic syndrome.”

Rather than lighting a fire under audiences, it seems to have the opposite effect: it produces an enervating passivity, more along the lines of “Oh, well, everything is fucked, so might as well sit back and watch the show.”

It is a failure of imagination.

The future is yet to be written. Sometimes the relentless iterations of grimness, impoverishment and abject debasement in cinematic form feel like a kind of training manual, preparing humanity to simply accept their terrible fate as inevitable.

Here is where fear starts to feel like a trap, a soul-sucking slide into inertia and despair. But something else can happen in the process.

A flame gets lit. Anger, of the holy variety, lights a beacon on the hill, spreading from one person to another, uniting people instead of driving them into fractiousness.

The reality of conflict is something that most Canadians have never experienced.

We’re nearing the end of the generation who lived through the Second World War. My former mother-in-law was a child when the Nazis marched into Norway; she still remembers the sounds of their boots on the street.

The boomers that fled the draft in the United States are also getting older. But those folks still remember that taking a stand was ultimately the only thing to do.

There is always another way, a different path. It need not be utopic, but I wouldn’t mind a little utopia right about now. Something bigger, brighter and more hopeful to work towards. A better future.

‘2073’ is streaming on Apple TV.  [Tyee]

Read more: Politics, Film

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