2073

“I hope someone finds this," are the opening words of 2073. "Maybe it's not too late for you.” The main character Ghost, played by Samantha Morton, lives in a ruined world. She is trying to comprehend how this happened. Documentary flashbacks to the years 1990-2024 make it clear.

Filmmaker Asif Kapadia (Senna, Amy) blends dystopian fiction with current reality to show the scale of the disaster we are barreling toward. While Ghost struggles to survive among the ruins of a scorching hot San Francisco, the main focus of the film is on what took place half a century earlier.

The police looked the other way when Indian Muslims were being murdered. False advertisements manipulated the British to vote for Brexit. Journalists in the Philippines feared for their lives. Chinese mass surveillance and oppression were replicated across the globe, while tech billionaires accumulated troubling quantities of information and ecosystems collapsed due to the greed of ever-expanding corporations. Kapadia’s film is a montage of the calamities of recent decades. Together they form the prologue of a sinister science fiction film. Can we still turn the tide?