Nov 43 min read

‘2073’ LFF 2024 Review: We Live in a Society

Inspired by Chris Marker's 1962 short film La Jetée, Asif Kapadia’s 2073 premiered to a full house at the London Film Festival. Advertised as a seemingly scathing takedown of modern-day politics and its implications for our future, the documentary-fiction film’s true message lies in the details — how right-wing ideologies and hegemonic power structures shape our lives in the present day.

The film begins with narration on what the world of the film looks like - a classic device in many post-apocalyptic dystopian works. Kapadia interweaves real reportage from the Philippines, India, and the UK, to underscore how authoritarianism takes root today. 2073 shows footage of various reporters who stood against oppressive governments, as well as the harassment and threats they received due to their stances: Maria Reesa, an investigative reporter from the Philippines who was arrested for speaking out against President Rodrigo Duterte; Rana Ayyub, an Indian journalist, who faced money laundering charges widely viewed as government retaliation for her critical reporting on the treatment of Muslims in India; Carole Cadwalladr, a British reporter, who uncovered Boris Johnson’s voter fraud.

Placing these real-world events against the fiction of the film is what sets 2073 apart from numerous other dystopian worlds. The year 2073 is not far away from 2024; this immediacy is felt by the film and conveyed to the audience. The narrator, Ghost, recounts a world that closely mirrors our own; the weaponisation of technology against human beings, and the commodification of information that is actively impacting art, politics, activism, and community. Both become enactors of totalitarian regimes in New San Francisco, making the film's dystopian vision all the more unsettling.

Countless aspects of the film are disturbing reminders of our present-day reality with calls for prison reform, data privacy, and social security. In my opinion, the film’s most powerful moment comes after the credits have rolled. In the final shot, Ghost is caught by the regime and taken to a “reprogramming” facility where it is implied that they are killed via lethal injection as punishment for resisting the new, authoritarian-approved history. After the credits roll, the camera is turned towards the audience; we are brought into the scene, being asked questions that test our knowledge and compliance, and when the robot asks us what two plus two is equal to, it urges us to say five. It continues to correct us by telling us that two plus two is five. The curtains close on this final shot.

2073 illustrates how easily established truths can be rewritten, reshaping collective understanding There was once a world in which eugenics was considered scientific and factually substantiated; this world is not that far into the past, and a future in which pseudoscience is weaponised to subdue and oppress humanity is creeping closer to us. The film showed us how this is already happening in Xinjiang, Palestine, and numerous other places. It builds on the idea of information in a globalised world, depicting how Amazon workers are seen as data mines for computers to analyse and optimise. The film is not merely critical of this behaviour in a vacuum; it toys with the discomfort of the audience as witnesses, and then turns to a future where living in a decrepit, defunct Bloomingdale’s shopping centre is preferable to entering the society that has been constructed from glass and steel by corporations to maximise human output and efficiency. The footage used in the film makes it disturbingly easy to envision a future where human beings are reduced to mere resources, much like the dystopian vision of people as batteries in The Matrix franchise

Asif Kapadia’s outspoken stance against the Palestinian genocide cost him numerous positions on prominent film committees and panels; it is no coincidence that 2073 speaks about a world in which reportage, art, and history are narratives controlled by libertarians, lobbying groups, and mass industries to serve those in power. The film makes its future believable, and slowly, 2073 feels less like a dystopia and more like reality.