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?

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Where to watch 2073