2073 Trailer (2024) Samantha Morton

2073 Trailer (2024) Samantha Morton

2073 Trailer (2024) Samantha Morton, Naomi Ackie, Thriller Movie
© 2024 - Neon

We’re getting the first look at 2073, Academy Award and BAFTA-winning director Asif Kapadia‘s (Amy) film, billed as a genre-bending thriller set in a dystopian future. Directed by Kapadia and starring Samantha Morton, Naomi Ackie and Hector Hewie, the film will make its world premiere Tuesday out of competition at the Venice Film Festival.

2073 is inspired by Chris Marker’s iconic 1962 featurette La Jetée — about a time traveler who risks his life to change the course of history and save the future of humanity — which previously served as the basis for Terry Gilliam’s sci-fi pic 12 Monkeys, with Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt.

Related Stories
'2073'
'2073' Review: Director Asif Kapadia's Dystopian Portrait Of The Future Feels All Too Real - Venice Film Festival
Samantha Morton in '2073'
Director Asif Kapadia On Why He Wanted His Sci-Fi Docudrama '2073' To Feel Like "A Punch In The Stomach" - Venice Film Festival
Per the synopsis: “It’s the year 2073, and the worst fears of modern life have been realized. Surveillance drones fill the burnt orange skies, and militarized police roam the wrecked streets, while survivors hide away underground, struggling to remember a free and hopeful existence.”

Watch on Deadline
Ad Loading
00:00

00:33

Described as a mixture of visionary science fiction and speculative nonfiction, 2073 stars Morton as “a survivor besieged by nightmare visions of the past – a past that happens to be our present, visualized through contemporary footage interconnecting today’s global crises of authoritarianism, unchecked big tech, inequality and global climate change,” according to the synopsis, which concludes, “2073 is an urgent unshakable vision of a dystopic future that could very well be our own.”

Neon, Double Agent and Film4 partnered to co-finance and exec produce the film. Kapadia and George Chignell are producing. Davis Guggenheim, Nicole Stott and Jonathan Silberberg exec produce on behalf of Concordia Studio, alongside Riz Ahmed’s Left Handed Films.

Check out the trailer above.

Must Read Stories

Hide Articles
‘Joker 2’ Falls To $39M-$40M U.S. Open, $121M Global; Why It Went Sideways

‘SmartLess’ Podcast Snags Tim Walz Interview

Elon Musk, AKA “Dark MAGA”, Says Election Is “Must-Win” At Trump Rally

How ‘SEAL Team’, Despite Near-Recast & Streaming Shift, Made It To 7 Seasons

Read More About:
2073
Asif Kapadia
Samantha Morton
Real life meets sci-fi in Neon's trailer for 2073, a new film from Amy and Senna director Asif Kapadia.

This one looks like an interesting splice of documentary and fiction — it's set in 2073 and stars Samantha Morton as a survivor of a post-apocalyptic future, looking back at how everything was already going wrong in 2024.

"It's too late for me," she says at the end. "It might not be too late for you."
We're all worried about what the future holds for humanity, and movies — which are a reflection of the times we live in — have begun delving into this angst more and more frequently. While some touch the subject subtly, titles like 2073 aren't afraid of throwing salt in the wound and making audiences reflect on urgent topics. Today, a trailer was released for the unique film.

The trailer for 2073 doesn't shy away from stressing the horrors of modern society. The story is seen through the eyes of Ghost (Samantha Morton), who lives in a dystopian Neo-San Francisco in the not-too-distant future. At that time, the powers that be were divided into three groups: Libertarians, Dictators, and Tech Bros. Due to living off-grid in a highly monitored society, Ghost is a target and might "disappear" like many others before her.

Also underscored by the trailer is the genre-bending nature of 2073. From the looks of it, the movie doesn't present itself as science fiction, but rather a real-life drama that doesn't differ much from the reality we live in right now. In the trailer, it's made clear that this is neither fiction nor documentary, but a warning. Some of the main themes touched by the movie are pretty easy to pinpoint in 2024, like a Democratic recession, the rise of neo-fascism, the climate disaster, and the intrusion of surveillance technology.

Who Is the Team Behind '2073'?
2073 is directed by Asif Kapadia, a pretty prolific filmmaker in the documentary world. He's previously helmed critically acclaimed titles like Senna and Amy, as well as the acclaimed horror movie Creature. Kapadia co-writes the script of 2073 with Tony Grisoni, who previously penned The Man Who Killed Dom Quixote and episodes from Electric Dreams and The Young Pope.

In an official statement, Kapadia explained what he hopes to achieve with the movie and what prompted him to work on such an ambitious project. He wrote:

"'2073' is about a feeling of dread at what is happening and being normalised around the world. The film started after seeing Brexit happen through lies and corruption in the UK, I felt I had to make a film to understand why the world seemed to be moving towards lies, authoritarianism, violence. I interviewed journalists around the world, was I going crazy, or was something happening? The journalists agreed, there was a global trend, a democratic recession, technology played a huge part and this was also aiding the destruction of the planet’s ecosystem. '2073' has come out of those interviews and research. My aim was to connect the dots between many complex issues and countries in a single cinematic film."

2073 does not yet have a wide release date. Stay tuned at Collider for further updates.
“2073” can’t come soon enough.

The upcoming feature, distributed by Neon and inspired by Chris Marker’s influential “La Jetée” (which was also the basis for Terry Gilliam’s “12 Monkeys”), imagines a bleak future world, using footage and interviews from our present to drive the point home.

You can watch the first trailer for Asif Kapadia’s hybrid feature, combining non-fiction and fiction elements, below:

“2073,” which premieres out of competition (in the non-fiction category) this week at the Venice Film Festival, stars Samantha Morton and Naomi Ackie in a narrative that features time travel, alongside talking head interviews with Maria Ressa, Carole Cadwalladr, Rana Ayyub and Ben Rhodes.

It’s a fascinating (and extremely depressing) conceit that will see director Kapadia, who has helmed documentaries like “Senna” and “Amy” but also narrative projects like episodes of David Fincher’s “Mindhunter,” combine two disciplines in exciting and unique ways. The official synopsis describes it as “a warning of the world we will get if we don’t act now.”

“An Inconvenient Truth” director Davis Guggenheim serves as an executive producer, with Oscar-nominated “Arrival” cinematographer Bradford Young shooting “2073.” Riz Ahmed’s Concordia Studio also executive produced.
2073, a new film by Oscar-winning filmmaker Asif Kapadia, mixes documentary and sci-fi to project an image of the future in which we fail to solve the problems of 2024. Kapadia brilliantly casts Samantha Morton, the precog who could predict the future in The Minority Report, as someone reflecting on her past — our present — and the interlocked problems of climate change, runaway capitalism, and the rise of neo-fascist politics. Kapadia’s docu-drama premiered this week at the Venice Film Festival.

2073 - Official Trailer
Post Tags:
#Video Content
#Video of the Week
“2073” sounds like a drama, but it’s apparently a genre-bending documentary-hybrid that has been described as a “true sci-fi” horror. Presumably, that means it really bends our understanding of what a documentary can be. Inspired by Chris Marker’s iconic 1962 featurette “La Jetée,” it follows a time traveler who risks their life to change the course of history and save the future of humanity. How is that a documentary? Your guess is as good as ours, but it is making its world premiere this week at the Venice Film Festival.

The film has a big cast and includes Samantha Morton, Naomi Ackie, Hector Hewer, plus Maria Ressa, Carole Cadwalladr, Rana Ayyub Ben Rhodes, Rahima Mahmut, Silkie Carlo, Cori Crider, George Monbiot, Nina Schick, Chris Smalls, Douglass Rushkof, Carmody Grey, Tristan Harris, James O’Brien, Anne Applebaum, Antony Lowenstein (as themselves). Acclaimed cinematographer Bradford Young shot the film.

Here’s the official synopsis:

It’s the year 2073, and the worst fears of modern life have been realized. Surveillance drones fill the burnt orange skies and militarized police rooms the wrecked streets while survivors hide away underground, struggling to remember a free and hopeful existence. In this ingenious mixture of visionary science fiction and speculative nonfiction, Academy Award-winning filmmaker Asif Kapadia (Amy) transports us to a future foreshadowed by the terrifying realities of our present moment. Two-time Academy Award nominee Samantha Morton (In America, Sweet and Lowdown, Minority Report) plays a survivor besieged by nightmare visions of the past—a past that happens to be our present, visualized through contemporary footage interconnecting today’s global crises of authoritarianism, unchecked big tech, inequality, and global climate change. 2073 is an urgent, unshakable vision of a dystopic future that could very well be our own.

Here’s Kapadia’s director’s statement from Venice:

2073 is about a feeling of dread at what is happening and being normalized around the world. The film started after seeing Brexit happen through lies and corruption in the UK, I felt I had to make a film to understand why the world seemed to be moving towards lies, authoritarianism, violence. I interviewed journalists around the world. Was I going crazy, or was something happening? The journalists agreed that there was a global trend, a democratic recession, and technology played a huge part, and this was also aiding the destruction of the planet’s ecosystem. 2073 has come out of those interviews and research. My aim was to connect the dots between many complex issues and countries in a single cinematic film.

“2073” has no release date yet, but NEON has North American distribution rights and has premiered a new trailer today. Watch below.

2073Asif KapadiaNaomi AckieSamantha MortonVenice 2024Venice Film Festival
In “Amy,” Asif Kapadia‘s Oscar-winning gut-punch about pop icon Amy Winehouse (and to a lesser extent in biographical docs “Senna” and “Diego Maradona” too), the British director employs an emotional rhythm by which his subject’s tragic end seems foredestined right from the start. Perhaps “2073,” his new hybrid docufiction is a natural expansion of that impulse — a blend of archival footage, CG enhancement and speculative fiction that applies similar retroactive dismay to a cautionary tale about a near-future dystopia, and the current rising tide of everything-is-terrible that may bring it about.

Unfortunately, what is highly effective as a biographical rise-and-fall tactic is far less so as a means to make a grand statement about imminent societal collapse. It’s not clear quite who is going to be galvanized into action to avert catastrophe when according to “2073,” almost everything that will lead to civilization’s demise — from AI to climate change to technocratic mass-surveillance to anti-democratic authoritarianism to global migration and health crises — has already, hopelessly, happened. The only surprise is that it will apparently still be 50-odd years before the Hydra-headed beast of global breakdown will reduce us all to scavenging in basements beneath abandoned shopping malls while aboveground, drones patrol the ruined, miasma-choked streets of what was once a city.

Related Stories
concert crowd and stock arrow
VIP+
New Live Music Data Suggests Cautious Optimism
Julia Garner as Terry Gionoffrio in Apartment 7A, streaming on Paramount+ 2024. Photo Credit: Gareth Gatrell/Paramount+.
'Apartment 7A' Review: The 'Rosemary's Baby' Prequel Is Entertaining, if Often Self-Defeating
It is 37 years after “the Event” and Ghost (Samantha Morton, who deserves a more original dystopia than this one) is a scavenger living in a basement beneath an abandoned shopping mall while aboveground, drones patrol the ruined, miasma-choked streets of what was once San Francisco. Near-mute except for a brief encounter with an ex-college professor (Naomie Ackie), Ghost, clutching an unearthed copy of “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” like it’s scripture, speaks to us in voiceover from the bowels of a derelict Bloomingdales so littered and trashed it looks like a TJ Maxx. “It’s too late for me,” she intones gravely, “but maybe it’s not too late for you.” Confusingly, this suggests she knows she’s talking to the past, in a “La Jetee”-style time-travel twist absent “La Jetée”‘s logic. The perspective is further distorted by Ghost’s tale of woe, which is cobbled together from stories she heard from her grandmother, unfurling in a blizzard of clips culled from existing news reports and viral memes, all slathered in Antonio Pinto’s insistently emotive score.

Popular on Variety
Sometimes the imagery is manipulated: “Chairperson Trump Celebrates 30th Year in Power” reads a chyron on a Times Square-sized LED screen, which in a sour joke is referring to Ivanka (who will be 92 in 2073, by which time it seems a leader’s age is no longer an issue.) But mainly Kapadia and co-writer Tony Grisoni find plenty of material that’s chilling enough without alteration: houses floating away in floods, forest fires, brutal police arrests, riots, Uyghur detention camps and Mark Zuckerberg trying to remember to blink. The same current-day dictators recur in a blur of hatespeak and fearmongering: Modi, Xi, Maduro, Duterte, Bolsonaro, Orban, Putin — the gang’s all here. Musk and Thiel, Murdoch and Bezos pop up, as do Priti Patel, Nigel Farage and Steve Bannon. But that all these apocalypse-beckoning factors and personalities are fundamentally intertwined is a point barely made by a presentation that is more like a joyless game of disaster whack-a-mole.

Instead, shouldering the burden of explanation, a bevy of commentators like Rana Ayyub, Carole Cadwalladr and James O’Brien offer their analyses, like so many 2024 Cassandras. In particular, Kapadia leans on the dazzling connect-the-dots persuasiveness of razor-sharp Filipina journalist Maria Ressa, to the point that one wonders why we’re not simply watching Ramona S. Diaz’s “A Thousand Cuts,” which is all about Ressa and covers much the same ground as “2073,” without the distractingly busy framing.

Agitprop is rarely designed to rouse anyone’s rational and decent impulses yet it’s hard to think of a better term to describe Kapadia’s polemical approach. It’s too easy for noble intentions to get lost when there are grievous lapses in judgement like including, against one of the ephedrine spikes of Pinto’s score, the infamous photo of a dead toddler lying face-down in the wet sand of a Greek beach. Or the direct homages to the classic sci-fi canon (the “Blade Runner” Voight-Kampff test cameos) which merely further fictionalize and defang an already cinematically overfamiliar vision of the desolate fate that awaits humankind.

Doomscrolling between reportage and speculation in an effort to both alarm us with fact and awe us with fiction, the film ends up doing neither. Instead it’s an overwhelming dose of whataboutism, that by listing the sheer number of ways in which we’re screwed is more likely to paralyze than to energize a response to any one of them. Emerging depressed from “2073,” it’s hard not to feel like Ghost was wrong, and actually, it is already too late for us as well.

Read More About:
2073, Asif Kapadia, Samantha Morton, Venice Film Festival
Jump to Comments
‘2073’ Review: Dystopia is Inevitable in Asif Kapadia’s Busy but Despondent Docufiction
Reviewed at The Hazelton Hotel Screening Room, Toronto. In Venice Film Festival — Out of Competition. Aug. 22, 2024. Running time: 83 MIN.
Production: (UK) A Lafcadia production. (World Sales: Neon, New York.) Producers: Asif Kapadia, George Chignell.
Crew: Director: Asif Kapadia. Screenplay: Asif Kapadia, Tony Grisoni. Camera: Bradford Young. Editor: Chris King, Sylvie Landra. Music: Antonio Pinto.
With: Samantha Morton, Naomi Ackie, Hector Hewer, Maria Ressa, Carole Cadwalladr, Rana Ayyub Ben Rhodes, Rahima Mahmut, Silkie Carlo, Cori Crider, George Monbiot, Nina Schick, Chris Smalls, Douglass Rushkof, Carmody Grey, Tristan Harris, James O’Brien, Anne Applebaum, Antony Lowenstein.