Tribeca: “A Bright Future” Questions Who the Future is For
For as long as humanity has existed, the brave have left home to explore new worlds, and there’s always mystery and uncertainty associated with these journeys. In the Tribeca-premiering A Bright Future, directed and co-written by Lucía Garibaldi, the world is ravaged and the only hope is in the North. Wrapped in this dystopian immigration tale is a somber reflection on who influences the choices we make and how leaving doesn’t always solve the problem.
courtesy of Tribeca
A Bright Future takes place in a near-distant future where neighborhoods are sequestered from one another. All the residents, regardless of which neighborhood they live in, dream of moving to the North. It’s a place none of the woes seem to reach and where prosperity is a possibility, but not just anyone is eligible to go there. Young people between the ages of 18 and 25 are put through a series of strange questions to test their aptitude. If they pass, they move North. The only other way to see this promised land is by paying an exorbitant amount of money to enter a raffle. Elisa (Martina Passeggi) is part of the latest group of recruits to be selected for the North, following in the footsteps of her sister. However, as the day she’s set to leave draws closer, Elisa can’t help but feel like something isn’t adding up about the North.
As much as it sounds like A Bright Future is about the North, we never see it. The film is as much about the unknowable as it is about the reality that’s in front of our faces every day. The opening of the film takes the audience and Elisa from the retro-futuristic testing center to the smog-filled factory neighborhood Elisa lives in. She exists torn between two worlds, like everyone around her. They all have to live with the fact that the future is happening without them. That the world is being repaired and rebuilt, but not for them. Youth is the only currency that really matters anymore, and when that well has run dry, it’s hard to find a purpose.
courtesy of Tribeca
Even with its lofty science-fiction concept, A Bright Future feels intimate. We are in Elisa’s shoes as she struggles to decide on the best course of action. Does she live out her mother’s wishes and go North to be with her sister? Or does she stay in the town she knows, loves, and has a life in? What good is a life if you don’t have someone to share it with? Everything she hears about the North is that she would essentially become a cog in a machine. Working for a purpose larger than herself which, on the surface, can be admirable, but it also may mean working herself to the bone for someone else’s profit. Where is the line drawn?
A Bright Future is a well-crafted piece of speculative fiction that’s deeply personal. It’s a film about the grand smallness of our lives. The simple things we miss when the world is broken open, like birds chirping and dogs barking. The North is a place of honor, where history is being made, but the only way people are remembered is if they’re loved enough to be documented. A Bright Future is about the connection to everyone and everything around us that makes us human.
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