Director Asif Kapadia on Making His Sci-Fi Docudrama ‘2073’ a Gut Punch at Venice

In 50 years, what state will the world be in? Based on current indications, it’s hard to avoid answering, “Pretty grim.”

That’s certainly the perspective of Oscar-winning filmmaker Asif Kapadia, who imagines a dystopian future in his new film, 2073, a hybrid documentary-drama that premieres today at the Venice Film Festival. Kapadia scans the planet and sees alarming signs—in climate change, the rise of authoritarianism, and the growth of technology as a means of manipulating the public and suppressing dissent. It’s a trifecta from hell.

“It is literally like a dream project, but it’s also a nightmare project. It really is,” Kapadia tells Deadline. “It’s like a ‘cry for help’ film, which is hard to do when they take years to put together and to finance and to cut and to somehow make them work as a film, while also keeping the kind of emotion that you start with, which is what the f*ck is going on in the world?”

Kapadia sets his film 49 years from the present day, in a post-apocalyptic time. A woman (Samantha Morton) lives hand-to-mouth in an abandoned mall; surveillance drones track her moves and those of other bedraggled humans scattered here and there. In voiceover, the woman reflects on words her grandmother told her about an earlier era (say, 2024) when society appeared at a tipping point but ultimately failed to save itself. Morton’s character flashes back to documentary footage that could be pulled from recent newscasts—global warming-driven wildfires and floods; urban landscapes in Gaza, Ukraine or Syria decimated by bombing; tech titans like Elon Musk becoming wealthier by the millisecond.

Kapadia says he sees 2073 as a “warning,” adding, “I wanted it to feel heavy and a punch in the stomach, to be honest. I wanted it to hit people in the gut and I consciously didn’t want to give solutions and hope and have a happy ending. I wanted it to feel uncomfortable. I wanted it to feel like this is serious.”

The filmmaker traces the origins of the project to Brexit in 2016, the referendum that saw U.K. voters, by a slim margin, elect to quit the European Union. The reasoning behind Brexit baffled Kapadia.

“It was me losing my kind of naivete of what was going on in the world, really—that idea of why would anyone do anything to make everyone worse off?” he recalls. “We’re in Europe, why would you cut us off from the rest of Europe? Why would you make it hard for my kids to travel? For me to travel? Yesterday, I didn’t have to have a visa and then today I would have to have a visa. [My kids] could travel everywhere for free or study anywhere in Europe for free. And now they can’t. Why? A few people made a lot of money. That’s why. On lies.”

Nigel Farage’s UK Independence Party—right wing, populist, anti-immigration—was the prime mover behind Brexit. The “leave” camp leveraged data mining of social media and misinformation to stoke anti-immigrant sentiment among voters.

“It always comes down to racism and the idea that, ‘It’s all your fault,’” Kapadia says of the animating spirit of Brexit. “I’m a brown person, my background is Muslim; I’m not religious, my family are not, but in the end, we are to blame for everything going on in the world. And that’s when I just thought, right, well I think I have to do something about this, because it’s global.”

A few months after Brexit passed, Donald Trump—right-wing, populist, anti-immigrant—won the election for U.S. president. That same year, right-wing populist Rodrigo Duterte took power in the Philippines. A few years later, Jair Bolsonaro, cut from a similar mold, was elected president of Brazil. Narendra Modi, India’s populist, anti-Muslim leader, took control of his country in 2014.

“It’s not a film about Trump, it’s not a film just about the U.K., it’s not just about Europe,” Kapadia says, “it’s about Asia, Latin America, it’s about all of these places and, coincidentally, why is it happening at the same time?”

The grand unifying theory of 2073 is that the climate disaster, right-wing populism and the growing influence of technology oligarchs are connected.

“You can’t be interested in the climate if you don’t understand who’s in power,” Kapadia says. “And if you want to understand who’s in power, you need to understand who’s helping them stay in power, which is the tech bros. And they don’t have to pay tax. Great. So they want certain people in power. How else can you become so rich?”

The villains of 2073, one might say, include Farage, Steve Bannon, the Murdochs, Musk, Peter Thiel, Roger Ailes, Tucker Carlson, Vladimir Putin among others. But there are heroes too—a handful of investigative journalists including Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa and Carole Cadwalladr, both of whom have examined the deleterious impact of social media on democratic institutions. Interviews with them and a handful of other journalists are woven throughout 2073.

“Honestly, the most important people right now, for me, in the world are journalists, people holding power to account, people who are being killed or attacked or blown up just for telling you what’s going on,” Kapadia says. “You may know some of these journalists, you may not know all of them, but you should know who these people are.”

Kapadia sees the hybrid drama-documentary approach as a way of expanding the potential audience for his film to people who don’t normally gravitate towards nonfiction.

“It is in a way my attempt to do a mixture of a kind of genre sci-fi, dystopian horror doc mixed with an essay film,” he notes. “Can you show the future with archive and make it an epic? But actually, it’s all based on fact.”

Source: Deadline