Festival gem: Future My Love
Maja Borg parallels the breakdown of her relationship with the global financial collapse in this unique documentary featuring 95-year-old social engineer and futurist Jacque Fresco.
The future not only can, but has to be different, despite the heartbreak.”Director Maja Borg
What’s it about?
On the one hand, Borg’s experimental documentary is an ambitious and provocative consideration of a radical new social and economic model, as proposed by Jacque Fresco, a structural designer and futurist who lived through the Great Depression. On the other, it’s a haunting love letter to Borg’s failed relationship with her former partner. The universal blends with the personal to explore questions of freedom and social responsibility.
Who made it?
Swedish director Borg, whose short film Ottica Zero showed at the BFI London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival in 2009. In some ways the short film informs Future My Love, as it follows actor Nadya Cazan on a search to find an alternative way of living. Future My Love is her feature debut, and was nominated for the Michael Powell Award for Best British Feature Film at the Edinburgh International Film Festival.
What’s special about it?
Jacque Fresco. Passionate, intelligent and up for debate, Fresco is a gift for any filmmaker. Borg interviews him at the Venus Project, an organisation started by Fresco and Roxanne Meadows, which aims to restructure society through what he terms a “resource-based economy”.
The film is visually gorgeous, using archive footage, black and white Super 8 film, and colour HD. Borg uses footage from Ottica Zero, which was also filmed at the Venus Project, to draw parallels between the collapse of the global economy with the breakdown of a relationship. On paper this might sound self-absorbed, but on the screen it serves as a poignant complement to the debate, recalling the personal journeys of filmmakers such as Chris Marker and Sarah Turner.
It’s one of the most ambitious films screening at the Festival. It asks big questions, and considers why individuals are so resistant to social change even when it works in their best interests.
What the critics are saying:
A passionate, inventive epistle about the end of days. It’s a rare, lovely, generous, caring, hurt, recovering film, like Adam Curtis meets Star Trek. I loved it.”Critic and filmmaker Mark Cousins
