Asif Kapadia sees a futuristic vision of the world where “President” Ivanka Trump celebrates her 30th year as leader of a nightmarish fascist police state once called America, a land largely reduced to rubble after an unknown “catastrophe” in the year 2036.
“It’s kind of a joke, but it’s not a joke either,” the British director says of the mention of Donald Trump’s daughter in his dystopian documentary “2073,” which is about the dystopian world humanity is likely heading toward and the very real, contemporary factors of politics, the environment, corruption, race and technology that he says are pushing us in that direction.
“Because if you look at American politics, there are certain families that stay in power — and the number of people who come from a small gene pool is crazy,” he says.
While Ivanka’s inclusion may be a touch of humor, the rest of “2073” — which is backed by Neon, Double Agent and Film4 and has its world premiere in Venice on Tuesday — offers little to praise. The film is what Kapadia says is his response to the world — and the entertainment industry — having reached “a place where people can’t say anything” critical of the status quo or those in power without risking their jobs or worse.
So “2073” says a lot, a lot. It blames impending catastrophe—whether nuclear war, climate change, or something else—on leaders, charlatans, tech billionaires, and the 1 percent of the world’s population, and what they’re doing to the planet and society. Beyond the Trumps, there’s the Murdochs, Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, Xi Jinping, Mohammed bin Salman, Narendra Modi, the Koch brothers, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, and many others, along with news clips and amateur footage from the past two decades showing examples of police brutality, rising fascism, the refugee crisis, mass incarceration, bombings, and wildfires.
Originally, the project—which began during lockdown (Kapadia tweeted a plea for help and quickly assembled a team of researchers from around the world)—was supposed to be “a documentary in the future where everything from the future is real and made up of bits of the present.” But he quickly decided to use his backstory to mix the two, creating a version of life in the year 2073 in which Samantha Morton plays a silent survivor beset by nightmarish visions of the past and lives underground while drones patrol the surface.
This past, Kapadia says, was pieced together using “footage from about 60 different countries, which made it seem like one place.” Some of the footage is very recent. In the opening scenes that reveal this devastating catastrophe, we see clips of the recent destruction in Gaza.
“After being in this business for a while, if you feel like you’re about to discover something terrible, the world tunes in to the movie,” he says. The war in Gaza, the rise of artificial intelligence and the growing sense that the upcoming presidential election could be “the end of democracy in the United States” all started after he started making the film. “Then a few weeks ago in England we had all these riots.”
“2073” may seem like an unlikely film from the Oscar-winning documentarian known for “Amy,” “Senna” and “Diego Maradona,” but he claims this trilogy of profiles came about “by accident,” each steeped in his previous experience in drama and fiction and each crafted in this way. “Senna is an action film, Amy is a musical, a Bollywood film, and Diego Maradona is a gangster film set in Naples,” he says.
But “2073,” an experimental dystopian thriller, still feels like a major departure for the director, a deeply provocative and uncomfortable-to-watch film that takes on universal themes and hopes to make people realize that “what’s happening out there is going to get closer and closer and eventually it’s going to come to you.”
As he notes: “And if you don't think this is a problem, it's just a movie. But if it is a problem, you and I have to do something.”
Kapadia is already among the most outspoken filmmakers on social media when it comes to discussing politics, particularly in condemning Israel for the bloodshed in Gaza. While that hasn’t hindered his career the way it has for others, he says “2073” — given the subjects and the extremely wealthy and powerful people it discusses — could hinder his career.
“I’ve been fortunate enough to make movies, and I’ve been successful at what I do,” he explained. “So honestly, I went into this business saying to myself, ‘I’m going to give it my all, I’m not going to be afraid to say what I see, and if I never work again, well, at least I made this movie.’”
