Something to watch tonight: Wednesday 16 April

2073 (Kapadia, 2024) & 2040 (Gameau, 2019)

Asif Kapadia is respons­ible for two of the best doc­u­ment­ar­ies I’ve ever seen – Senna (2010) and Amy (2015) – and anoth­er very good one – Diego Maradona (2019) so I was intrigued to see how he was going to approach the chal­len­ging top­ic of, well, the future.

2073 is an ambi­tious pro­ject that uses a fic­tion­al­ised, plaus­ible, dysto­pi­an future as a fram­ing device to tell us what we are all doing wrong in the here-and-now. Samantha Morton plays a char­ac­ter called Ghost, liv­ing in a tiny pod inside a ruined shop­ping mall in New San Francisco. As she wanders around the urb­an waste­land caused by some­thing called “The Event”, she uses the stor­ies her grand­moth­er told her to warn us about what’s coming.

Not every­one is scav­en­ging a liv­ing – the olig­archs man­aged to make sure their future was a lot cosi­er – and a lot of what Kapadia and co-writer Tony Grisoni are on about is the danger of unchecked inequal­ity and the ease with which wealth can secure itself against the rest of us.

In William Gibson’s Peripheral series of books (and the TV series adap­ted from them), “The Event” is called “The Jackpot” and it’s a com­bin­a­tion of envir­on­ment­al, eco­nom­ic and polit­ic­al dis­asters that – when they arrive all at once – soci­ety can’t recov­er from.

In the doc­u­ment­ary parts of 2073, the usu­al naysay­ers like Monbiot, Cadwalladr, Rushkof, etc. lay out all the cir­cum­stances that are lead­ing us to “The Event” (or “The Jackpot”) but without offer­ing much advice oth­er than “don’t do it like this, or else”.

Being scol­ded by a doc­u­ment­ary isn’t much fun. Back in 2009 I reviewed a sim­il­ar film called The Age of Stupid, in which Pete Postlethwaite played a museum cur­at­or on an off-shore oil rig filled with what remained of humanity’s treas­ures, and I wrote: “The prob­lem is – what were/are we sup­posed to do? The Age of Stupid unfor­tu­nately isn’t very con­struct­ive and may leave audi­ences feel­ing only guilty and helpless.”

If you want to still feel a little bit of hope for the future, you need to go back to 2019 and Damon Gameau’s 2040. Made before Covid sent the world mad, 2040 is the Australian director’s follow-up to the hugely suc­cess­ful That Sugar Film. In it, he tries to ima­gine a world that his daugh­ter – then only four – might inher­it and wheth­er we might be able to make it even bet­ter than the one we had then.

To do so he focuses on tech­no­lo­gies and tech­niques that are already in use and that only require wide adop­tion to make a glob­al dif­fer­ence. Micro-grids from renew­able energy sources, car­bon sequest­ra­tion via sea­weed – Did you know that some sea­weeds grow up to half a metre a day – and regen­er­at­ive farm­ing.

Gameau is an enthu­si­ast­ic and per­suas­ive guide. The editor-in-chief and I removed a huge amount of sug­ar from our diets after see­ing him host­ing a That Sugar Film screen­ing in Wellington and watch­ing 2040 was a sim­il­ar sort of ton­ic. In these times, it is des­per­ately import­ant that we see people mod­el­ling pos­it­ive change and don’t give in to cyn­icism or even des­pair. Let’s leave the dysto­pi­an futures for fic­tion, eh?

Where to watch 2073

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

Aotearoa & Australia: Streaming on DocPlay

Canada: Digital rental

Ireland: Not cur­rently avail­able online

India: Not cur­rently avail­able online

USA: Streaming on Max

UK: Digital rental

Where to watch 2040

Aotearoa: Streaming on DocPlay or Beamafilm

Australia: Streaming on FoxtelNow, DocPlay or Beamafilm

Canada: Streaming on CBC Gem

Ireland: Digital rental

India: Not cur­rently avail­able online

USA: Streaming on Kanopy (via par­ti­cip­at­ing pub­lic libraries)

UK: Digital rental