We were among the few to attend the screening of 2073 at the Prince Charles Cinema, directed by Oscar-winning filmmaker Asif Kapadia. The Green Londoner brings you the story. Review co-written with Guy Morris, climate consultant and investor.
“If you don’t have facts, you don’t have truth. Without truth, you can’t have trust.”
Does this statement from Maria Ressa, the courageous Filipino and American journalist, resonate with you—especially today?
Yesterday, we watched 2073, the new docu-fiction from Asif Kapadia, at a screening in the West End.
We won’t spoil it (too much) because you need to see it. Check their website for upcoming screenings.
So what’s the plot?
We’re in 2073. The world has collapsed (George Monbiot’s op-ed 2 days ago has proven true).
San Francisco is the new US capital.
Tech bros and oligarchs control everything.
The rich live in a bubble, still seeing the sun.
The poor crawl underground, trying to survive.
A red dust haze fills the city. Mountains of trash pile up.
It’s District 9 meets our near future.
The state sees everything.
Drones patrol, AI-driven robots control, suspect, and punish.
History repeats itself—but worse.
The film jumps between past, present, and future, blurring the lines.
Archival footage of political dissidents, journalists, and citizens being silenced, tortured, and oppressed gains new meaning when shown together.
Climate catastrophe isn’t just a backdrop—it’s another enemy.
The planet fights back, destroying not just humans, but entire ecosystems. (We would have liked to see more focus on this—perhaps our professional bias.)
A hard film to make & show
The post-screening Q&A with Asif Kapadia and Carole Cadwalladr, investigative journalist, was eye-opening. They revealed how:
• Financing, producing and distributing a film like this is incredibly difficult – and involves a huge amount of risk on the part of the Director.
• The warnings of Carole Cadwalladr’s investigative work into Facebook and Cambridge Analytica back in 2016 are now more relevant than ever.
• The progressive left has been left floundering in the face of a more organised, power-hungry (and happily deceitful) right.
• Allowing corporations to track everything we do, own, consume and like might seem harmless when the corporations are on our side and the governments are largely benign. But the situation looks a lot different when the government is less benign, and the corporations fall over themselves to win their favour.
• What was already a fragile situation has become exponentially more threatening with the arrival of Generative AI. LLMs have been trained on our data without our permission and are already being used to replace human labour. If we allow this to proceed unchecked, we can have little complaint when our lives end up adversely affected by it.
Final thought: Action
A. Kapadia was very explicit in the Q&A that he didn’t want to include a call to action at the end of the film. His goal was just to use the evidence available to him to articulate an entirely possible (if absolutely terrifying) future scenario, and inspire the audience to reflect, discuss and then act. It was left to Carole Cadwalladr to put into words what this might look like: “150 years ago, we had awful working conditions and child labour. And we would probably still have those things if people hadn’t united, organised and resisted.”
One key thing everyone can do straight away is reflect on the media we consume, and ask questions about the motivations of the people providing the information. Independent media like The Green Londoner is a key way to hold power to account and argue for greener, more equitable policies and behaviours.
