The screen glows with an unsettling luminescence as Asif Kapadia’s mindbending film 2073 unfolds, dissolving the comforting boundaries between documentary evidence and speculative vision. We enter a cinematic space where time collapses upon itself — where news footage from yesterday’s broadcast becomes archaeological evidence from tomorrow’s catastrophe. This temporal destabilization is Kapadia’s most audacious experiment yet, representing a radical break from the archival immersion that defined his celebrated trilogy on singular figures of exceptional talent and tragedy.
The filmmaker who once meticulously excavated the lives of race car driver Ayrton Senna, singer Amy Winehouse, and soccer icon Diego Maradona through existing footage now inverts his methodology completely. Where those earlier works reassembled archival fragments to recover a coherent narrative from the past, 2073 deliberately fractures our temporal perception, positioning today’s documentation as a prophetic artifact. “I’m going to show you the future, but using elements of the present, and that’s where archive comes in,” Kapadia explained in an interview, revealing the conceptual foundation of his hybrid approach.
Asif Kapadia: ‘A God’s Eye View of the Whole World’
Uncover hidden connections
This methodological innovation emerges from Asif Kapadia’s recognition that conventional documentary forms simply cannot capture the networked nature of contemporary political crises. “I knew there wasn’t going to be a central character,” he acknowledged. “My aim with this film was to kind of almost have a god’s eye view of the whole world.” This celestial perspective liberates Kapadia from the constraints of biographical focus, allowing him to trace connections across disparate political phenomena with a freedom that traditional documentary practice rarely permits.
The film’s most striking insight comes not from Kapadia himself but from Indian journalist Rana Ayyub, who observes of global authoritarian leaders: “It’s like they’re almost all on the WhatsApp group” — an eerily prescient observation of the March 2025 incident in which senior Trump administration officials, including National Security Advisor Mike Waltz and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, used the encrypted messaging app Signal to discuss a planned military operation in Yemen. Due to an error, journalist Jeffrey Goldberg was added to the chat, leading to the public disclosure of sensitive military details.
This prophetic insight captures precisely what makes Kapadia’s film so revelatory — its ability to render visible the hidden choreography of authoritarianism across national boundaries. Through careful visual orchestration, Kapadia reveals not just parallels but direct connections between political developments previously treated as discrete phenomena.
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Astounding Visual Execution
Working with cinematographer Bradford Young (known for the ethereal imagery of Arrival), Kapadia shot dramatic sequences on LED stages similar to those used in The Mandalorian. These technologically sophisticated scenes provide the narrative architecture that houses Kapadia’s documentary excavation. “I wrote that to put it in to give us something to cling onto as we fly around the world with these little time capsules that we created of archive events,” he shared. The result is a film that feels simultaneously grounded in factual reality and unmoored from conventional temporality.
The visual execution is remarkably seamless. Dramatic scenes featuring Samantha Morton as a survivor in a dystopian New San Francisco flow naturally into documentary footage of contemporary climate disasters, creating moments where the viewer becomes genuinely disoriented about whether they’re watching a fictional representation or factual documentation. “The footage that we show of New San Francisco … it’s all red, the red skies, all of that’s real,” Kapadia emphasized. “I haven’t manipulated that footage.”What distinguishes 2073 from conventional political documentaries is its refusal to compartmentalize crises. Where traditional media might examine climate change, democratic backsliding, and technological surveillance as discrete phenomena, Asif Kapadia weaves them into a coherent tapestry. “People make these films and they sit in little boxes … And I just thought, well, it’s all the same thing, so can I put it all into one movie?” This integrative approach allows Kapadia to reveal the hidden relationships between seemingly disparate developments — the way ecological crisis facilitates authoritarian control, how surveillance technology enables political repression, how media consolidation undermines democratic accountability.
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2027’s Transnational Viewpoint
The film’s power derives partially from Kapadia’s multicultural perspective. “My background is from India. I’ve worked in Brazil, I’ve worked in Europe, I live in the UK, I’ve worked in the U.S.,’ he mused. “I just saw the same kind of elements, the same playbook happening everywhere, and I just thought, ‘It’s happening everywhere at the same time.’” This transnational vantage point allows him to recognize patterns that might remain invisible to those confined within singular national contexts. His gaze traverses borders with the same fluidity as the capital and information flows that structure our global reality, revealing connections that national frameworks systematically obscure.
What makes 2073 particularly unsettling is how quickly its prophecies seem to manifest in reality. “Every day, some of our freedom is removed, something else is changing. Some law comes in. The idea of peacefully protesting becomes illegal,” Kapadia observed.
See beyond limits
In its final moments, 2073 resists the consolation of easy solutions or uplifting messages. “I don’t think it’s as simple as putting a neat little moment at the end of the film and saying, if you do this, everything could be great,” Asif Kapadia reflected. Instead, the film concludes with a question rather than an answer, positioning itself as the beginning of conversation rather than its conclusion. This refusal of false comfort represents perhaps Kapadia’s most radical gesture — a recognition that cinema’s true political power lies not in offering reassurance but in altering perception. We leave the theater with vision transformed, newly attuned to connections previously invisible, equipped with a perceptual framework that renders legible the networked nature of contemporary authoritarianism. In this sense, 2073 represents nothing less than a new visual epistemology for our fragmented political moment — a way of seeing that might just be the precondition for effective resistance.
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