What am I supposed to say to her? What if the future truly resembles the grim vision of 2073? How could I ever look her in the eye? I won’t be here fifty years from now, but will I not still bear the weight of her resentment—her curse—when she surveys the broken world we left behind?
2073, directed by Asif Kapadia, represents a bold departure for a filmmaker renowned for his incisive documentaries on figures like Ayrton Senna, Diego Maradona, and Amy Winehouse. With 2073, Kapadia steps into uncharted territory, crafting a hybrid of documentary and narrative storytelling deeply inspired by Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962). Anchoring the film is Samantha Morton’s haunting performance as a ghost wandering through the ruins of a dystopian, devastated world. This fictional device becomes a lens through which Kapadia revisits and dissects the recent decades—the very years that set humanity on the path to this apocalyptic future.
By intertwining archival reflections with speculative storytelling, 2073 offers not only a chilling forecast of what may lie ahead but also a sobering examination of the choices and events that brought us to the brink. Kapadia’s shift into this hybrid genre feels both daring and urgent, a necessary evolution for a filmmaker unafraid to confront the consequences of our collective past.
Kapadia’s film unravels the threads of our unravelling world with a frenetic, information-rich visual style, an onslaught of images and ideas that come at you like flashes of warning sirens. Through the film’s fragmented memories and flashbacks, we see how it all began: the erosion of truth with the discrediting of journalism, the impossibility of fact-checking in a sea of misinformation, the transformation of politics into a performative circus played out on social platforms like Twitter, X, Facebook and the rest of cyberspace. Activism has been warped into hashtags and fleeting digital outrage, while the ambitions of figures like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos—visions they present as utopian—are exposed for what they truly are: desires that, when realized, leave room for only a privileged few.
Kapadia holds up a mirror to our reality, showing us a planet brought to its knees—ravaged by environmental collapse, the widening chasm of wealth inequality, and the rise of unchecked populism. In one especially harrowing segment, the film focuses on Los Angeles as it exists today: a city where vast stretches have been abandoned to homelessness, where entire parts have become enclaves of despair that are only growing larger. Kapadia uses this as a harbinger—a stark reminder that the dystopia we fear is already here, creeping in increments, normalizing itself before our eyes.
2073 ultimately becomes an indictment of our collective choices and failures. It predicts a world that spirals into chaos, a swamp-like catastrophe where nations and societies are swallowed whole, leaving no escape for the vast majority of humanity. Watching it, I can’t help but think of my daughter and the world I’ve handed her—a world so precarious, so irredeemable.
Towards the end of the film, somewhere, the security forces that have taken over in 2073 finally arrest and interrogate the ghost. The interrogation is done by a robot. After being subjected to a series of inquisitorial questions, the ghost whispers to herself in response to the question of whether she has ever participated in a protest gathering: “I wish I had protested when I could.” Viewers who had the patience to stay until the end credits, instead of leaving the hall early to get to the next film, were faced at the end on the screen with the image and questions of the same interrogator robot, who was now addressing them: “Has your view changed with this film? Do you intend to do anything?” The scary, comic, grotesque, or bitter part of the story is that the director himself was reprimanded for sending a couple of lines condemning the war and destruction in Gaza, was removed from the list of patrons of The Grierson documentary foundation, and was subsequently forced to apologize. Of course, there was no need for this news and that final image. I, for one, don’t think tomorrow is too late; I think it’s too late for everything today.
The Kermanis, the people of Iran’s Kerman province to whom I am connected through my father’s lineage, have a unique linguistic quirk: they often use the adverbs “late” and “far” interchangeably. For instance, when someone is delayed, they might say, “So-and-so has gone far, “I don’t know, perhaps this feeling of lateness or the distance of small dreams, the fact that 2073 is presenting its truths from these frightening and hopeless days before our very eyes, made Guy Maddin’s satire (with co-direction and co-writing by Evan and Galen Johnson) in the film Rumours seem utterly tasteless and, as they say, late and far. Guy Maddin, a director with a distinctive style whose visual compositions, sometimes based on visual patterns of silent films or taking an experimental direction, has gathered the G7 leaders in Rumours to thoroughly mock them in their encounters and exchanges with each other and the apocalypse they themselves have created. Well, my hatred for the decisions of these politicians who are seriously toying with our lives and deaths is so high for me and many others that I really don’t know why I should laugh at the filmmaker’s clever remarks and jokes. Fear of the future and pessimism about the fate of humanity and living in a ruin born from our and others’ decisions are clearly visible in two other films whose events take place in the future, The End (Joshua Oppenheimer) and The Assessment (Florencia Colucci). I will return to these two films later on another pretext, but for now, I will move on from the inevitable future and focus a little on the flawed present.
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At the London Film Festival, when things around me also become late and far and the films bring a lot of raw ideas into my head, I constantly look around among the critics and am always waiting for a few critics with whom I have had a friendship for 18 years and with whom we argue about our ideas, perceptions, and interpretations after each film. One of the people I’m always waiting for is Mr F. The elderly Iraqi critic who, from the first year I came to the festival, asked me about Hamid Reza Sadr and told me he had been his guest in Iran several times. Mr. F has always been deeply passionate about regional and trans-regional political discussions, making him an exceptional companion for exploring the political and cultural dimensions of cinema. Our conversations after each film invariably begin with his trademark phrase, “It was interesting.”
On the first day of the festival, I asked another Iraqi critic—a kindred spirit in political discussions, whose views align closely with mine—where Mr F. was. His reply carried a weight I hadn’t expected: he was mourning the loss of his brother, having been unable to return home for the funeral. He sat there, the cinema hall his only refuge from grief, as though the films might momentarily soothe his pain. He assured me that Mr F. was fine but had spent the past year dealing with his wife’s illness. Mr F. didn’t appear at the festival until the middle days, but when he did, fate placed him right next to me, and as always, conversation flowed naturally—because we understand each other so well.
We began, predictably, with the unsolvable impasses of the Middle East: the hypocrisy and lies of leaders, the incompetence of officials, the entrenched flaws in cultural mindsets and the relentless interference of Western powers—interventions that have consistently resulted in even more devastating consequences for the people. Eventually, though, we shifted to our shared passion: cinema. Mr F.’s deep interest in Iranian and Middle Eastern cinema never wavers. He spoke admiringly of Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig, praising its allegorical richness and futuristic undertones with his familiar refrain: “It is interesting.” We moved on to Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice, and Faisal emphasized its sharpness—how, despite its limited public screenings in America, it felt to him like Iran’s most potent “missile” aimed directly at Trump.
I listened, but then I offered my confession. While I agreed the film exceeded my expectations—proving to be much stronger and more cohesive than Abbasi’s Holy Spider—I still felt it fell short of what it could have achieved. Abbasi’s exploration of Trump as a character felt constrained, as though the film had only scratched the surface of the larger truth: that Trump is not a lone creation but a product of the world we live in, a world that continually spawns men like him and movements that sustain them. Focusing too heavily on the likes of Roy Cohn, who might as well have built “young Trump” in a laboratory and left him as his twisted legacy, risks missing the forest for the trees.
I explained to Mr F. that despite the film’s brisk pacing and its nods to the faults of the judicial system, Abbasi seemed unwilling to rise above his subject. There’s a conservatism in his storytelling, an apparent satisfaction with merely illustrating the facts rather than dissecting the forces that make Trump and his ilk inevitable. The lack of daring ambition—the unwillingness to provoke further, to go deeper—leaves The Apprentice feeling like a competent, well-made film but not an extraordinary one. It doesn’t transcend its subject; instead, it settles for depicting it.
I told Mr F. that I honestly didn’t want to argue further about The Apprentice and preferred to share my thoughts on Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig. I admitted that my opinion wasn’t exactly popular here. Discussing films like this—or any other underground Iranian work—is always fraught with difficulty. You cannot separate the immense circumstances of their creation: censorship, financial and emotional burdens, travel bans, and threats of interrogation. Criticism of these works risks being misunderstood, accused of justifying or sympathizing with the very systems you yourself reject and critique. Mr F. interrupted me here, nodding knowingly. He told me he had experienced something similar, but from the reverse perspective, when he visited Tehran years ago as a guest of Hamidreza Sadr (may God rest his soul, and Mr F. used the Arabic “Rah” with reverence). He recalled how his honest account of Tehran’s daily life and cinema in a published report had led readers to accuse him of sympathizing with the Iranian government.
Hearing this, I felt comforted—thankful, even—that Mr. F. understood this feeling of constraint so deeply. At last, I could speak freely. Throughout this festival, and perhaps for much longer, I’ve been struck by the realization that human suffering, injustice, and despair are not confined to any one place or generation. These crises seem to migrate perpetually through time and geography, like a vulture circling for fresh corpses. Disaster moves from South Korea to Argentina, from Chile to the Thatcher-era Ireland so powerfully depicted in Steve McQueen’s Hunger, to the brutal 1972 killing of demonstrators captured in Paul Greengrass’s Bloody Sunday, and to the Peterloo Massacre in Britain, as shown in Mike Leigh’s work. Now, it hovers ominously over the Middle East—above Iraq, Syria, and Iran—its shadow darker and more relentless than ever.
This year Walter Salles’ I’m Still Here, for instance, captures the brutality of Brazil’s military dictatorship so poignantly that it feels as if I’ve lived it myself, its anguish and oppression easily mirroring a century of shared suffering in our lands.
This is why I understand—and even respect—the praise Rasoulof receives, both from Western and Eastern critics. The courage to record, to confront cruelty, to bear witness to history is undeniable. But what I cannot grasp, I explained to Mr F., is the praise lavished on the cinematic qualities of The Seed of the Sacred Fig. Compared to a film like I’m Still Here, Rasoulof’s work feels starkly lacking: in warmth, in life, in character depth, and in the narrative cohesion a story like this demands.
Of course, one might argue that the film’s flaws are a result of its underground production conditions, its filmmaker’s exile, and the oppressive environment for those left behind. Yet, I believe that even in a world free of such constraints—under another government—this would still be Rasoulof’s filmmaking style. A style that, after his early films (The Iron Island and The White Meadows), which bore a poetic and allegorical richness reminiscent of Mohsen Makhmalbaf and Bahram Beyzai, has leaned increasingly into overt political statements.
In The Seed of the Sacred Fig, Rasoulof sets out to document, allegorize, and predict simultaneously. He gives us a meticulous visual record of judiciary offices adorned with photos of Iranian clerics and martyrs, unofficial intelligence houses, and snapshots of the unrest of 2022. For Western (and eastern) audiences eager for knowledge—and images that are already widely available online—the film satisfies a particular curiosity. Yet as an Iranian viewer, I grew increasingly frustrated. The film’s characters and their actions felt underdeveloped, their motivations unclear. Why does Generation Z, portrayed here, oscillate between picking up a gun and standing passively by as their mother is tortured? How does she
How could she possibly fix an old, outdated, dilapidated amplifier—miraculously repaired, presumably by watching a YouTube tutorial—which then leads to effortlessly trapping their father? Why does this seemingly moral, God-fearing man—a “monster” of the director’s design—feel so unjustified within the film’s own narrative logic? And what is the purpose of those meandering subplots—the filmmakers with mobile phones, the interrogation that leads nowhere, or the jarring bathing scene?
I know that everything in The Seed of the Sacred Fig—all these elements—exists to build toward Rasoulof’s final scene, his ultimate MacGuffin. But I couldn’t help but wish for something more: a deeper exploration of character transformation, a more believable trajectory, like Farhadi’s The Salesman, or something more resonant, more inevitable, like Polanski’s Death and the Maiden. But Rasoulof is neither Polanski nor Walter Salles, and these abnormal circumstances—the ones that shape the film and its maker—will not give us something better than The Seed of the Sacred Fig for now.
Mr. F. listened, thoughtful but unmoved, as our conversation inevitably returned to the sorrows of the Middle East—war, fear, and uncertainty. Seeking a change in tone, I gently asked about his wife’s condition. With weary resignation, he explained that, after enduring long waits for care in public hospitals under the NHS, he had taken her to Spain for treatment. I sympathized deeply, sharing how budget cuts and the post-COVID surge in patients had overwhelmed our medical systems. Every day, as a member of the medical community, I face the frustration, anger, and helplessness of patients who are forced to wait.
I continued our conversation with Mr. F., trying to reconcile my own disillusionment.
But still, Mr. F.—I don’t understand this world. At this year’s festival, the contradictions were everywhere. On Falling, directed by Laura Carreira in the lineage of Ken Loach, tells the quiet tragedy of a Portuguese immigrant woman in Britain. Trapped in relentless monotony, she moves like the rotating box on the conveyor belt depicted in the film: stuck, circling, but never advancing. Even on the one day she dares to take leave for a job interview, the universe conspires against her. And when she finally breaks into tears—like a character from a Mike Leigh film, inventing stories of trips and joys that never happened—we, too, break down with her, unable to escape the weight of her despair.
Then there was Bird, Andrea Arnold’s latest work, which immerses us in the barren existence of delinquent youth in Britain. For Bailey (Nykiya Adams), a teenager lost in violence and poverty, surrounded by misery and a broken family, escape comes only in the form of a guardian angel—a bird, imagined and conjured, offering him protection in the void. Arnold imbues the film with a fragile beauty, capturing moments of tenderness against the harshness of their reality. But by the end, when the film closes on a wedding scene, Mr. F., you know, and I do, too: the ceremony is no salvation. It is not a turning point, but a fleeting respite. Their lives, steeped in ruin and despair, will march on unchanged, the weight of their circumstances unshaken by the hopeful gestures of a single day.
On the other hand, at the same festival, we were also presented with Endurance, a National Geographic-produced documentary directed by Jimmy Chin, Natalie Hewit, and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi. The film juxtaposes two sea voyages across a century, each defined by human tenacity—and a sense of futility.
The first voyage recounts the early 20th-century journey of the ship Endurance, led by Ernest Shackleton. In 1915, Shackleton’s ambitious Antarctic exploration ended in disaster when the ship became trapped in a vast, unyielding expanse of ice and snow. Shackleton and his crew of 28 endured years of unimaginable hardship, their survival an extraordinary testament to human resilience. Through painstakingly restored photographs and sounds, enhanced with modern technology, the documentary vividly brings this harrowing tale to life, immersing viewers in the raw determination of those who braved the unendurable. Running parallel to this historical tale is the second voyage: a modern-day attempt, funded at great cost and undertaken after one failed mission, to locate the remnants of that same lost ship.
While Endurance captures humanity’s resilience and awe-inspiring capacity to persevere against impossible odds, I couldn’t shake a fundamental question throughout the film: what would we, as a species, have truly lost if that first expedition—what they themselves call “a glorious failure”—had never taken place? Beyond the fascination of the story itself, what tangible purpose did that arduous and ultimately fruitless journey serve?
Now, a century later, as immense resources and effort are poured into locating and recovering a few splinters of wood to display in a museum, I couldn’t help but feel that this endeavor epitomizes the Persian anecdote of “digging a well for the sake of placing a minaret within it.” It’s an exercise in spectacle—a pursuit of grandeur that raises more questions about its necessity than it provides answers about its value.
Isn’t the money spent on these endeavours—this romanticized search for remnants of failure—essentially wasted? Couldn’t this money, lavished on a symbolic ghost from the past, have been better spent on the living? On characters like the struggling immigrant woman in On Falling, trapped in a cycle of poverty and hopelessness, or on the delinquent youths of Bird, whose bleak futures cry out for redemption? Or what of patients like Mr. F.’s wife, forced to navigate systems that fail them, their lives held hostage to bureaucratic neglect? Surely, a few scraps of history could never outweigh their suffering.
But Endurance goes beyond merely documenting human perseverance; there’s an existential layer buried beneath its surface, one that risks being overlooked. Among the sailors who miraculously survive the frozen desolation of ice and disbelief, there lies a cruel irony: before the sweat of their struggle to survive has even dried, many voluntarily march straight into the trenches of World War I—a conflict far more absurd and senseless than their fruitless voyage ever was.
Please look for Part 3