Asif Kapadia’s ambitious and genre-defying docu-fiction delivers a loud yet panicky warning against the dangers of totalitarianism.
Filmmaker Asif Kapadia celebrated the vigour of the individual spirit in his critically acclaimed trilogy of biographical documentaries—Senna (2009), Amy (2015) and Diego Maradona (2019). His fear of an environment threatening the existence of such spirits is palpable in his latest film 2073, which premiered at this year’s Venice Film Festival. Inspired by Chris Marker’s seminal La Jetée (1962), 2073 is an ambitious, genre-defying piece that delivers a loud yet panicky warning against the dangers of totalitarianism without pulling any punches.
Kapadia frames the film between the titular year and the present day. By 2073, the earth has become an environmental and humanitarian wasteland. Resources and free will are short, while authoritarian control—replete with surveillance drones and robotic sniffer dogs—is in excess. A silent woman called Ghost (Samantha Morton) gropes for light with a hand-cranked torch and scrounges for resources. She encounters an AI-envisaged young man with “puppy-dog eyes” (Hector Hewer) and an idealistic history teacher still clinging on to hope (Naomi Ackie). The allegorical role of these figures are not lost—the former, despite his innocuous appearance, represents a potential threat to present-day life and the latter, seen clutching The Autobiography Of Malcom X, represents the visceral challenge to the status quo as embodied by the Black Lives Matter and Free Palestine movements. A mournful voiceover speaks for Ghost, lamenting the state of the world and delivering the film’s ominous punchline: All is lost in 2073.
The wasteland Ghost inhabits blurs the line between past, present and future and this is where Kapadia’s brilliance shines. For starters, 2024 and the early 21st century notionally become the past while the despondency of 2073 stands in for the present. This conceit is designed to strike terror in our minds as to what is already unfolding. Kapadia and editor Chris King opt for wide-angle shots of Ghost witnessing waste being dumped and of police brutality cut to real-life archival footage of the same action at tighter angles. It clearly implies that the signs of what is to come have already sprung up in 2024. The surveillance mechanism used in fictitious 2073 has been deployed by China since 2014 to monitor and persecute Uyghur Muslims. Progress and its quick pace have become legitimately terrifying.
Kapadia has prominent international journalists speak out and give insights into the workings of present-day governments over archival news footage. He posits three journalists as witnesses to the excesses of power—Maria Ressa, Rana Ayyub and Carole Cadwalladr, and frames them as keepers of the world’s conscience. They detail their battles against autocrats and their gaggle of trolls: Ayyub, an Indian columnist for the Washington Post, describes the wave of Islamophobia that has intensified in following the rise to power of Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, a right-wing Hindu nationalist party. Cadwalladr exposed the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2019, which involved the scheme of using private details of Facebook users for political advertising. All three women received threats to their life, freedom and dignity that were sexist in tone. Prominent voices like George Monbiot, Silkie Carlo and Rahima Mahmut are also heard speaking out about the suppression of freedom and privacy by governments through their associations with tech-bro oligarchs like Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. Nuance is junked in favour of panic, as they detail the levels to which creations backed by them—particularly AI—influence decisions made within the corridors of power that can potentially affect everyday life. They argue that every facet of life has been converted into data streams which can create a significant rupture in the very process of human evolution. It seems the talkdown given by Arthur Jensen (Ned Beatty) to Howard Beale (Peter Finch) in Network (1976) about the world being run by corporations has indeed become a reality.
2073 perhaps lacks nuance and is filled with panic in the way it expresses its outlook on the workings of modern society. Yet, such panic is not entirely unjustified, especially in light of tragedies occurring on account of power excesses. In such a climate, such a film necessitates essential viewing.
