The notion that the personal is political, and vice-versa, is writ large on this idiosyncratic essay film about one woman’s lost love and the planet’s future prospects. Musing on the aftermath of a failed relationship, director Maja Borg ponders broken personal connections in the context of a bigger picture, looking back on the Technocratic Movement of the 1920s and meeting 93-year-old thinker and designer Jacque Fresco on his compound in Venus, Florida. Fresco reckons we’d all be better off starting over again with a resource-based system making money superfluous.
Archive material and interview footage blends with more obviously ‘poetic’ imagery reflecting the lasting emotional imprint of Borg’s ex-girlfriend, all of this playing against an intimate voiceover in the director’s Scots-inflected Scandinavian English. Artful and ambitious, the film chimes with the past work of Chris Marker, but while undeniably sincere, it also proves diffuse and overloaded. Pitched on a very personal wavelength, it’s likely to divide viewers, though Borg’s insistence on eschewing familiar doc conventions deserves a nod of respect at the very least.