Asif Kapadia reinvents documentary filmmaking by setting it in the future

In 1962, Chris Marker’s La Jetée shocked audiences with its apocalyptic tale told entirely through still photos arranged in a stunningly disturbing montage. The 1995 sci-fi hit 12 Monkeys was inspired by it, and 60 years later, filmmaker Asif Kapadia has found an equally radical way to reinvent documentary form. His new film, 2073, merges archival footage with science fiction to create what he calls a "hybrid docufiction," pushing the boundaries of nonfiction storytelling into bold new territory.

"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?" Kapadia asks, referencing Marker's influence. This seemingly simple question led him to create something unprecedented -— a documentary
that looks forward rather than back while using the past to illuminate our potential future.

Asif Kapadia: ‘Failure Is an Orphan’
Asif Kapadia came to prominence with his 2015 film about British songbird Amy Winehouse. Amy won accolade after accolade, including an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature, a Grammy for Best Music Film, and a British Academy Film Award.

“Success has many fathers. Failure is an orphan,” Kapadia muses. “Amy was one example of sort of fighting everyone. And it was a studio film and that film became a really big hit. There was a different kind of technique.

“The idea of putting lyrics on the screen, it's the simplest thing, the idea of just building around Amy's songs and having her lyrics on screen, because people kept saying, ‘Why are you putting the lyrics? We all know the words to “Back to Black.”’ And I'm going, ‘I don't think you do. I think you're not really paying attention.’ So I put the lyrics so that you would stop getting carried away with a tune and listen to what she's telling you at every point in that every single song, the lyrics are so amazing.”

Kapadia's relationship with breaking documentary conventions runs deep. Amy eschewed talking heads, instead building an intimate portrait through archival footage that made its subject's tragic end feel "foredestined from the start." In 2010’s Senna, about race car driver Ayrton Senna da Silva — also a BAFTA winner — he pioneered a purely archival approach that redefined sports documentaries. With each film, Asif Kapadia has pushed further against the boundaries of what a documentary can be.

How 2073 Resonates
2073 represents Kapadia’s most ambitious expansion yet. Just as La Jetée's protagonist was haunted by a memory of his own death, Kapadia's film centers on Ghost (Samantha Morton), a survivor in dystopian San Francisco who serves as a witness to humanity's self-destructive path. Through her eyes, we see how our present-day crises — from climate change to surveillance to authoritarianism — could lead to catastrophe. "Different scenes have a different resonance to that audience," Kapadia notes of early screenings, where viewers each find their own local concerns reflected in the film's global warning.

The technical innovation required to realize this vision was substantial. Working with cinematographer Bradford Young (known for Arrival and Solo: A Star Wars Story), Kapadia employed LED stages for futuristic sequences while drawing on documentary footage for historical grounding. Most notably, he brought in two separate editing teams — Chris King for documentary sequences and Sylvie Landra for dramatic portions — creating what he describes as "two different creative brains for the two different films."

This dual approach recalls not only Marker's radical mixing of still and moving images, but also Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men, which Kapadia cites as an influence. ”It had this very down-to-earth look like normal London, but it's slightly off and futuristic and set in this world where because of what's happened to humanity, no children are being born,” Asif Kapadia explains. “It's a brilliant film. It's so clever how they do the visual effects, but also it feels more and more based on what's really happening in this country.”

Asif Kapadia’s Journalistic Backbone
The journalistic backbone of 2073 comes from Kapadia's extensive interviews with reporters like Maria Ressa, Rana Ayyub, and Carole Cadwalladr — journalists who have been warning about the erosion of democracy and rise of authoritarianism around the globe. Their testimonies provide the documentary foundation that Ghost's fictional narrative builds upon, creating a complex interweaving of present-day warnings and future consequences.

“Three women journalists who have decided their mission in a way is to hold their power and their leaders to account to reveal what they can see, the corruption, they can see what's happening, they report on it and for reporting on it,” Kapadia says. “They have been threatened, they have been attacked on social media, they've been sued, they've all had court cases against them.

“All of them are fighting a system, which it's almost impossible to beat, but yet they carry on reporting, they carry on doing their job.”

But perhaps the most revolutionary aspect of 2073 is how it reimagines a documentary's relationship with time itself. Where traditional documentaries look back to understand the past, and science fiction imagines possible futures, Kapadia's film exists in a liminal space between the two. Like Ghost standing in the ruins of San Francisco with her copy of Malcolm X, the film becomes itself an artifact from the future, not attempting to change the past, but helping us see our present with new clarity.

"It's too late for me," Ghost intones in a voiceover, "but maybe it's not too late for you." The line could have come straight from La Jetée, where the protagonist's memories become a portal for time travel. But where Marker's film traced a Möbius strip of personal fate, Asif Kapadia expands the scope to encompass all of humanity. Through this ambitious fusion of documentary technique and science fiction framework, he’s created something that transcends both genres — a warning from tomorrow about the choices we face today.

News Footage, Social Media Clips, and Dramatic Sequences
The film's approach to archival footage is particularly innovative. While traditional documentaries use archives to reconstruct the past, Kapadia repurposes them to construct a possible future. "Because of the nature of the experimental element of the film, I'm also hoping that the film is not too in-your-face preachy, but also cinematically interesting as a piece of art,” he says. “Because all of the films that I've made are art, as well as maybe having a point that is underneath.” His method of combining real news footage, social media clips, and dramatic sequences creates a disturbing temporal vertigo — viewers are never quite sure if they’re watching history, prediction, or some unsettling combination of both.

This uncertainty is deliberate. Just as Marker used still images to question cinema's relationship with time and motion, Kapadia uses the tension between documentary and fiction to probe deeper questions about truth and prediction. When we see footage of current-day dictators and tech moguls intercut with fictional future consequences, the effect is both journalistic exposé and prophetic warning.

Kapadia has potentially created the future of documentary itself. Just as La Jetée sparked decades of innovation in both art house and mainstream cinema, 2073 suggests new possibilities for nonfiction storytelling in an age of crisis. By looking forward to look back, it helps us see our present moment with desperately needed clarity and perspective.