Asif Kapadia’s 2073 is billed as both sci-fi dystopia and documentary, a categorisation that seems – at first – paradoxical. It begins in a decidedly fictional manner, as a grime-smeared Samantha Morton – known only as Ghost – silently trawls the ravages of an apocalyptic wasteland. Skeletal trees are burning, mounds of rubbish choke the rivers, and cities glow an eerie orange beneath chemical clouds and the buzz of drones. Something has clearly gone horribly, terrifyingly awry: an event happened 37 years ago, Ghost tells us in voiceover, and this authoritarian apocalypse is the result. Climate catastrophe, surveillance and state violence are now inextricably tangled together.
And then suddenly, the gears of the film shift, and the years flick back on screen to our recent past and inescapable present, constructing step by step how this dystopia came to unfold, and how it began sooner than we might believe. This is the documentary half of 2073, unpacking our current political nightmare through four distinct strands – the suppression of a free media, technofascism, hypercapitalism and climate catastrophe – interspersed with the legacy that Ghost has inherited from their fallout.
To say 2073 is a bleak film would be both an understatement and a reduction of Kapadia’s ambitious project. Certainly, the film is uncompromisingly, unrelentingly furious, as it remorselessly holds to light the countless dystopias we currently live under and tolerate: the election fraud of the Brexit referendum that paved the way for fascist migrant policies, the harvesting of biodata that enables the ongoing genocide of Uyghur Muslims, the minute tracking of Amazon employees to forensically control labour to name but a few. This anger is channelled and pronounced through editors Chris King and Sylvie Landra’s frenetic pace and jarring cuts, and if at times 2073’s documentary segments give way to some of the more brash didacticism of an Adam McKay film, it hardly feels unearned given the horrors we bear witness to.
Perhaps these horrors will be new to some, but there isn’t much Kapadia covers that hasn’t been said before in various ways; although there is a crisp articulateness to the interviewees he selects – George Monbiot and Maria Ressa amongst them – and a scope to the way he intersects these various pressure points of oppression that builds a compellingly broad picture. There is the argument to be made, if anything, that the film’s own politics are a little tenuous; it is strangely fixated on maintaining the integrities of the nation-state for a film so interested in its violence and failures.
Yet there is something monumentally powerful in its bringing together of these two genres, and in the way that Kapadia plays with their expected and preconceived temporalities. Dystopia is a genre obsessed with the imagination of a future; documentary with the archival of the past. In 2073, Kapadia disrupts this linearity in startling ways. There is no singular event, he tells us, no before or after. The future has already taken place – we have been living in it for a long time.
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