In a dimly lit editing suite in London, filmmaker Asif Kapadia is grappling with time itself. His latest work, 2073, represents both a culmination and departure from the groundbreaking documentary style he pioneered with 2010’s Senna and 2015’s Amy. But where those films excavated the past through innovative use of archival footage, 2073 dares to imagine a future shaped by our present failures — a vision perhaps unconsciously influenced by Kapadia’s own experience of surveillance and suspicion.
“Every day I read the news, it just feels more and more dystopian,” Kapadia reflects. “Everything happening just feels so strange and you can’t believe that’s actually happened. Some of them, every day the news just becomes more and more futuristic and sci-fi and terrifying.”
This sense of creeping dystopia isn’t merely theoretical for Asif Kapadia. Following a taxi driver’s report of him photographing New York cityscapes in the early 2000s, he spent nearly a decade on a U.S. watch list, experiencing firsthand the surveillance apparatus his new film now critiques.
The Origins of Asif Kapadia’s 2073
The genesis of 2073 emerged from Kapadia’s growing unease with global political shifts and the rise of technology-enabled surveillance. Drawing inspiration from Chris Marker’s La Jetée — a landmark of experimental cinema told entirely through still photographs — Kapadia wondered: “If he can do it with stills and black and white, can I do a film set in a future by captioning things using archive?”
This deceptively simple question led to an ambitious fusion of documentary and science fiction techniques. Working with cinematographer Bradford Young and two separate editing teams — Chris King for documentary sequences and Sylvie Landra for dramatic portions, the editors working on the film at different times — Kapadia crafted what could be called hybrid docu-fiction. The film’s visual language shifts seamlessly between archival footage, dramatic sequences filmed on LED stages (similar to The Mandalorian’s volume technology), and interviews with journalists like Maria Ressa and Carole Cadwalladr, who have been sounding alarms about democracy’s erosion.
The production process was equally innovative. Racing against an impending writers strike, Asif Kapadia and co-writer Tony Grisoni crafted the script in just three weeks. “I set a really tight deadline to get it made,” Kapadia explains, “and we managed to hit the deadline.” This urgency perhaps mirrors the film’s own warnings about time running out for democratic societies.
A Survivor Named Ghost
The film’s underground sequences, featuring actress Samantha Morton as a survivor named Ghost, were created through a groundbreaking combination of LED technology and documentary footage. “All of the people that she sees are from news footage, documentaries, and they’re all shots from around the world,” Kapadia reveals. “So the idea that the whole world is now existing underground and nobody lives in homes anymore on streets because that’s all gone. You have the mega-wealthy and the skyscrapers, and they have everything, and then you have people with nothing and there’s nothing in between.”
This dystopian vision draws clear influence from Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men, which Asif Kapadia admires for its grounding of future scenarios in recognizable present-day reality. “It had this very down-to-earth look like normal London, but it’s slightly off and futuristic,” he notes. Similarly, 2073 uses familiar archival footage to construct its future scenarios, creating an uncanny bridge between present and future.
Asif Kapadia: ‘The Film Changes’
The film’s reception has varied fascinatingly by region, with audiences finding different resonances depending on their local political contexts. “When I’m in the room, the film changes depending on who’s watching the film because different scenes have a different resonance to that audience,” Kapadia observes. This kaleidoscopic effect seems appropriate for a work that seeks to capture global patterns of democratic decay and technological control.
For Kapadia, who emerged from the British independent film scene with The Warrior before revolutionizing documentary form with Senna, this latest evolution feels natural. “I always try to work that way where it breaks the rules of traditionally how you’re meant to make films,” he says. This spirit of formal innovation has characterized his career from the beginning, but never has it been deployed toward such urgent ends.
The result is a work that defies easy categorization: part warning, part meditation on power and surveillance, part experimental cinema. Through this ambitious fusion of documentary technique and science fiction framework, Kapadia has created something that transcends both genres — a warning from tomorrow about the choices we face today.
“I want to shock the audience into action,” Kapadia states plainly, “not make them feel comfortable saying, ‘Oh, if you go out and vote, everything will be great.’ I don’t feel like that.” This refusal of easy comfort has defined Kapadia’s work from the beginning. His trilogy of Senna, Amy, and 2019’s Diego Maradona explored the human cost of fame and genius. With 2073, he turns that unsparing lens on our collective future. The question that haunts the film is whether we’ll heed its warning in time.
