By now, you must know Academy Award, BAFTA, and Grammy-winning filmmaker Asif Kapadia, known for “Senna,” “Diego Maradona,” and “Amy” about the late singer Amy Winehouse that won the Best Documentary Feature at the 88th Academy Awards. And his latest film, “2073,” sounds like it will test some boundaries.
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“2073” sounds like a drama, but it’s apparently a genre-bending documentary-hybrid that has been described as a “true sci-fi” horror. Presumably, that means it really bends our understanding of what a documentary can be. Inspired by Chris Marker’s iconic 1962 featurette “La Jetée,” it follows a time traveler who risks their life to change the course of history and save the future of humanity. How is that a documentary? Your guess is as good as ours, but it is making its world premiere this week at the Venice Film Festival.
The film has a big cast and includes Samantha Morton, Naomi Ackie, Hector Hewer, plus Maria Ressa, Carole Cadwalladr, Rana Ayyub Ben Rhodes, Rahima Mahmut, Silkie Carlo, Cori Crider, George Monbiot, Nina Schick, Chris Smalls, Douglass Rushkof, Carmody Grey, Tristan Harris, James O’Brien, Anne Applebaum, Antony Lowenstein (as themselves). Acclaimed cinematographer Bradford Young shot the film.
Here’s the official synopsis:
It’s the year 2073, and the worst fears of modern life have been realized. Surveillance drones fill the burnt orange skies and militarized police rooms the wrecked streets while survivors hide away underground, struggling to remember a free and hopeful existence. In this ingenious mixture of visionary science fiction and speculative nonfiction, Academy Award-winning filmmaker Asif Kapadia (Amy) transports us to a future foreshadowed by the terrifying realities of our present moment. Two-time Academy Award nominee Samantha Morton (In America, Sweet and Lowdown, Minority Report) plays a survivor besieged by nightmare visions of the past—a past that happens to be our present, visualized through contemporary footage interconnecting today’s global crises of authoritarianism, unchecked big tech, inequality, and global climate change. 2073 is an urgent, unshakable vision of a dystopic future that could very well be our own.
Here’s Kapadia’s director’s statement from Venice:
2073 is about a feeling of dread at what is happening and being normalized around the world. The film started after seeing Brexit happen through lies and corruption in the UK, I felt I had to make a film to understand why the world seemed to be moving towards lies, authoritarianism, violence. I interviewed journalists around the world. Was I going crazy, or was something happening? The journalists agreed that there was a global trend, a democratic recession, and technology played a huge part, and this was also aiding the destruction of the planet’s ecosystem. 2073 has come out of those interviews and research. My aim was to connect the dots between many complex issues and countries in a single cinematic film.
“2073” has no release date yet, but NEON has North American distribution rights and has premiered a new trailer today. Watch below.