‘2073’ Review: Director Asif Kapadia’s Dystopian Portrait Of The Future Feels All Too Real – Venice Film Festival

There’s a disturbing plausibility to director Asif Kapadia’s docudrama 2073, which just premiered out of competition at the Venice Film Festival. It’s set 49 years in the future, a time when surveillance drones swarm the skies and shock troops keep the order, truncheons in hand. We’re not in America anymore. Welcome to “New San Francisco – Capital of the Americas.”

Old geographic boundaries have dissolved, apparently, but not because we’ve all come together as one. No, the S.F. location hints at a future where Silicon Valley and its tech bro billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel have achieved hegemony, in alliance with authoritarian political leaders (for reference, see Putin, Vladimir and his ecosystem of oligarchs).

A digital billboard in a Blade Runner-like urban environment blares, “Chairwoman Trump celebrates 30th year in power” with a picture of a grinning Ivanka Trump. Farfetched? Maybe so, maybe not. (Kapadia clearly means this as a joke, one of a few he permits himself in what is otherwise a downbeat depiction of our trajectory).

In the scripted portions of 2073, Samatha Morton plays a woman struggling to hold onto a shred of freedom in this post-apocalyptic nightmare. We don’t know much about her, other than that she’s trying to stay off the grid and out of sight of drones. In voiceover, she recalls talk of an earlier time when humanity still had a chance to avoid catastrophe but blew it.

Flashback-like sequences suggest how everything went wrong – and this is where the documentary element comes in. Contemporary news footage shows wildfires, floods and massive storms — a gesture towards the ferocious impact of climate change. A mashup of imagery illustrates the current dangerous tilt towards right-wing populism: Muslims being attacked in Modi’s India; Duterte authorizing extrajudicial killings of alleged drug dealers in the Philippines; a tête-à-tête between Trump advisor Steve Bannon and UKIP party leader Nigel Farage, presumably plotting over how to spread their ideology far and white; British-Indian conservative politician Priti Patel, the former Home Secretary, gleefully promising to “end immigration” in the U.K.; footage of the “Unite the