Venice 81 and the journey (through time) at the end of democracy

Dystopia is the most ‘realistic’ genre in contemporary cinema. It is no coincidence that at Venice 81, Asif Kapadia’s new work, 2073, is set in a gloomy future dominated by ultraliberalists and dictators. But it is not a documentary, not completely, at least. The director’s experiment (which combines archive footage and science fiction) is inspired by Chris Maker’s experimental short film La jetée (1962), in which a man is sent back in time from a post-apocalyptic world. Everything was narrated through a montage of photographs as if anticipating the probable point of view of a Venice 81 spectator, who is facing so many movies that transport us from the future to the more or less near past to tell us about a theme now important everywhere: the crisis of democracy, unable to resolve its social and political contradictions and the fear of new nationalist and xenophobic authoritarianism. Like the traveller in Marker, an eagerly awaited leap (or snapshot) will take us to the origins of the fascist regime, with Luca Marinelli who shifts from the cine-comic villain of Jeeg Robot to the villain of the 20th century in M. But other ‘shots’ in recent days have shown us a US neo-Nazis sect attempting a coup d’état in 1984’s The Order, based on supremacist theories that, the film reminds us, will also influence the Trumpian insurgents on Capitol Hill in 2021 (shown in the doc Homegrown, at the International Critic’s Week that opened with the dystopian France of Planet B). From Brazil, on the other hand, Walter Salles in Ainda estou aqui retells the true story of a desaparecido in the 1970s of the military dictatorship, and Petra Costa’s doc Apocalypse in the Tropics focused on the growing power of religious fundamentalists under Bolsonaro. It seems that cinema takes on the fear that the darkest pages of history may repeat themselves, albeit in different forms. It is useful not only to remember the past but also to heed the warnings of tomorrow.