Director: Asif Kapadia
Fifty years from now becomes the vantage point for looking at today's world in 2073, a 2024 documentary-thriller from director Asif Kapadia that borrows its structure from Chris Marker's 1962 short La Jetee. Rather than building a single plot, the film uses a speculative future setting to examine present-day crises.
What is 2073 about?
Framed through a narrator living in a devastated future version of 2073, the film weaves together documentary footage on surveillance, climate breakdown, and political upheaval with a fictional frame inspired by La Jetee's time-travel premise. Instead of following one character's journey from start to finish, it moves between reportage and speculative narration, asking how the choices being made right now might shape the world its narrator is forced to survive in.
Cast & crew
Samantha Morton voices the film's central narrator, with Naomi Ackie and Hector Hewer appearing in supporting roles that anchor the fictional frame around the documentary material. Kapadia, known for documentary work built from archival footage, uses the small cast to give the speculative sections a human throughline.
Context & significance
2073 arrives from Asif Kapadia, a director recognized for archival documentaries, and pairs that background with a fictional device borrowed directly from La Jetee, the influential French short that also inspired Twelve Monkeys. The approach lets the film treat current events as source material for a future history rather than telling a conventional story, which is part of why it is classified as both documentary and thriller. It sits alongside a small but recognizable tradition of films that use a fixed future date as a framing device to comment on the present, rather than attempting to predict events with any precision.
Where & how to watch
2073 is available on K-Time with Persian subtitles, so Farsi-speaking viewers can follow the documentary and its narration with Farsi text on screen. The film's page can be read for free; watching the documentary itself requires logging into a K-Time account.