Hot Docs 2013: Future My Love Review (Paolo Kagaoan)

Future My Love

Featuring Maja Borg and Jacques Fresco

Directed by Maja Borg

A text can simply show the facts, which, at best make us feel like we’re soaring, exceeding our human, intellectual potential. Or it focuses on the consequences, making us feel weighed down and ambivalent. The latter is the riskier method and that’s the one that director Maja Borg uses in her new documentary, Future My Love.

Future My Love portrays two journeys. One shows Borg hitchhiking through the Western world to discuss futurism with some of its theorists. The most prominent one lives in Venus, Florida – 95-year old Jacques Fresco, who once explained his ideas in a local version of The Larry King show. As a sociology major, my tendency is to compartmentalize what kind of sociological movement to which he belongs. At first, he seems like a post-Marxist, forecasting the breakdown of traditional capitalism (not problematic). Then he also exclaimed about the elimination of Negro problems and race problems (problematic) into a melting pot of problems that everyone in the collapsed economy will face. But there’s also Durkhemian elements to his theories, that after the collapse comes an amalgamated society in which waste-less technology will mimic the human body in providing for every need. There are also other scientists in this documentary who agree about the technology part, that technology will end manual labour, which makes people resort to culture (I resent the truth in this). Borg agrees with Fresco and the other theorists although of course having her own objections.

What Future My Love also does is portray and talk to ‘regular people’ in Venus, somehow making them seem more credible and sympathetic than the theorists. She’s showing that both groups, especially the former, have their own experiences and contributions to the current economic model.

The second plot line reinterprets that journey as that of a woman following the lover who introduced her to all those ideas. The movie, then, becomes a love letter, frustrated at her beloved’s zealotry while deconstructing the nature of love. It also shows industrial destruction and decay and shows the dysfunction within the quest for traditional marriage. It could be the less interesting thread but it is also emotionally titanic, simply because it doesn’t make us question and poke holes the way we do in a conventional, idea-filled doc.

Yes, Future My Love begins and sticks with Borg’s narration that’s reminiscent of Malickian ‘pretentiousness.’ But we have to be emphatic towards her intentions – which are successfully executed. Form and content give an emotional depth to futurism as a sociological theory, a perspective that the latter badly needs. Besides, as she says, these theories aren’t just there to explain how we should live, they intend to show how we should care for each other.

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