The End We Start From is a 2023 British survival film directed by Mahalia Belo and starring Jodie Comer, with Benedict Cumberbatch, Katherine Waterston and Mark Strong. It is adapted by Alice Birch from the novel of the same name by Megan Hunter. (wiki)
The Platform (Spanish: El hoyo, transl. The Hole) is a 2019 Spanish social science fiction film directed by Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia.
The film is set in a large, tower-style “Vertical Self-Management Center.” Its residents, who are switched every month between its many floors, are fed via a platform which, initially filled with food at the top floor, gradually descends through the tower’s levels, stopping for a fixed amount of time on each. The system inevitably leads to conflict, as the residents at the top levels get to eat as much as they can, with each level only getting the leftovers from the previous ones.
The film’s cast includes Iván Massagué, Antonia San Juan, Zorion Eguileor, Emilio Buale Coka and Alexandra Masangkay. (wiki)
spacetime coordinates: Set in a dystopian 2067 where humanity is embroiled in a catastrophic blight and famine, the film follows a group of astronauts who travel through a wormhole near Saturn in search of a new home for humankind.
Interstellar is a 2014 epic science fiction film co-written, directed, and produced by Christopher Nolan. It stars Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Bill Irwin, Ellen Burstyn, Matt Damon, and Michael Caine.
Kip Thorne, a Caltech theoretical physicist and 2017 Nobel laureate in Physics, was an executive producer, acted as a scientific consultant, and wrote a tie-in book, The Science of Interstellar. The film has been praised by astronomers for its scientific accuracy and portrayal of theoretical astrophysics. Since its premiere, Interstellar gained a cult following, and it is now regarded by many experts as one of the best science-fiction films of all time. (wiki)
Cooper : You’re a scientist, Brand. / Brand : So listen to me when I say that love isn’t something that we invented. It’s… observable, powerful. It has to mean something. / Cooper : Love has meaning, yes. Social utility, social bonding, child rearing… / Brand : We love people who have died. Where’s the social utility in that? / Cooper : None. / Brand : Maybe it means something more – something we can’t yet understand. Maybe it’s some evidence, some artefact of a higher dimension that we can’t consciously perceive. I’m drawn across the universe to someone I haven’t seen in a decade, who I know is probably dead. Love is the one thing we’re capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space. Maybe we should trust that, even if we can’t understand it.
Russia 1985–1999: TraumaZone (subtitled in promotional media as What It Felt Like to Live Through The Collapse of Communism and Democracy) is a seven-part BBC documentary television series created by Adam Curtis. It was released on BBC iPlayer on 13 October 2022. Using stock footage shot by the BBC, the series chronicles the collapse of the Soviet Union, the rise of capitalist Russia and its oligarchs, and the effects of this on Russian people of all levels of society, leading to the rise to power of Vladimir Putin. (wiki)
I have written elsewhere about Adam Curtis and while I definitely do not dig his “God” perspective, his overbearing voice, his simplifications, and his political position, I think it is an important documentary in the light of what has happened in the East after 1989. This is not to mean that it justifies in any way the destruction and the crimes committed in Ukraine by Russian troops at the present time or the neo-imperialism at stake. But it is important to realize that the West needs some Eastplaining since it cannot fully comprehend what it means that a world has collapsed. A world good and bad, a world certainly repressive and certainly lacking Western consumer goods, but with an aftermath that can not as easily be forgotten. What happened in the wake of this imminent collapse, as we have seen (like in other places such as South America) was full-on privatization that came undemocratically, imposed from above and more or less at the point of a gun. The rise of the mafia state, under extreme free market rule was a bounty for kleptocratic leadership. These are far from isolated phenomena that happened at the margins of the capitalist core. The best example is probably the so-called Wirecard Skandal – a German e-commerce firm whose massive level of fraud and market manipulation is a clear example of what went on during the last 30 years of financialization.
So yes think not just about East, Africa or the Global South but the entire world financial infrastructure, auditing firms, regulatory bodies and politicians. Apart from neoliberal schism and morphing we have today what some have called “market civilizations” that encapsulate a transnational neoliberal movement from the Global South and Eastern Europe. The entire deregulatory push and austerity politics in Russia was undertaken under the guidance of global institutions and their specialists and is part of the increasing financialization of the world economy.
The collapse of the URSS has coincided with the collapse of supply chains, the destruction of the medical safety nets, of reduced and ailing educational and social welfare systems, and the immiseration of a great majority while the demand was now for the building markets and transforming overnight everyone into a hustling entrepreneur and rapid siphoning of funds abroad into bank account safety or feeding into financial markets speculation. One has to see this in parallel with Clinton’s administration opening up the floodgates of speculation and financial deregulation that even today affects us all.
More importantly, the entire West has been privy to this and especially American foreign policy. This documentary has to be seen and read with a book by historian and economist Isabelle Weber – who went on to describe how China escaped Russia’s fate (shock therapy) narrowly and during several times of its homegrown attempts at privatization and liberalization. I think one has to think about how during the planned economy something like this never happened. While I think that Adam Curtis is a bad guide to both the Soviet cybernetic history (and maybe even its Western examples), and one should take with a grain of salt all his comments on GOSPLAN and everything that has to do with the Perestroika years, I think his selection on the way the economist and prime minister Yegor Gaidar became the most hated man in Russia are quite telling. At the same time, because of his anti-statist bias, Adam Curtis dully ignored the way economic cybernetics has played out in Siberian institutes (which merits a documentary).
I think that Jeffrey Sach’s career and change of mind after being called in as economic advisor to the Russian state during Eltsin is also telling. Russia and Moscow was welcome into the fold of global capitalism, and it important it has profited as much as financial centers such as London have profited from it. Russian companies were very welcome till recently and they had mixed ownerships, behind tied with foreign Western interests. Oligarchs were sponsoring private schools in the UK, and till the recent sudden superficial boycott, they were quite welcome in The City (especially London the money laundering capital of the world where a majority of the offshore firms are registered).
spacetime coordinates: spring 1917 – November 1918 the Western Front – Northern France near La Malmaison Champagne the Forest of Compiègne –
All Quiet on the Western Front (German: Im Westen nichts Neues) is a 2022 German epic anti-war film based on the 1929 novel of the same name by Erich Maria Remarque. Directed by Edward Berger, it stars Felix Kammerer, Albrecht Schuch, Daniel Brühl, Sebastian Hülk, Aaron Hilmer, Edin Hasanovic and Devid Striesow. Set in the closing years of World War I, it follows the life of German soldier Paul Bäumer, who, after enlisting in the German Army with his friends, finds himself at risk to the realities of war, shattering the early hopes of becoming heroes. (wiki)
“Both timely and timeless, All Quiet on the Western Front retains the power of its classic source material by focusing on the futility of war.” rottentomatoes
After the collapse of Earth’s ecosystem, Vesper, a 13-year-old girl struggling to survive with her Father, must use her wits, strength, and bio-hacking abilities to fight for the future. (rottentomatoes)
Directors: Kristina Buozyte & Bruno Samper Starring: Raffiella Chapman, Rosy McEwen, Eddie Marsan, Richard Brake & Edmund Dehn. feat Melanie Gaydos. (Lithuania / France / Belgium coproduction)
spacetime coordinates: the novel occurs some time in the future, according to an elaborate chronology worked out by science fiction author Ian Watson in 1975: “the baseline date of AD 2300 for The Dispossessed is taken from the description of Earth in that book (§11) as having passed through an ecological and social collapse with a population peak of 9 billion to a low-population but highly centralized recovery economy.” In the same article, Watson assigns a date of AD 4870 to The Left Hand of Darkness; both dates are problematic — as Watson says himself, they are contradicted by “Genly Ai’s statement that Terrans ‘were ignorant until about three thousand years ago of the uses of zero'”.
The Dispossessed is set on Anarres and Urras, the twin inhabited worlds of Tau Ceti.
Urras is divided into several states, but is dominated by its two rival superpowers, A-Io and Thu. While on Urras, the main character spends most of his time in A-Io, a state with a capitalist economy and a patriarchal system. The state of Thu is never actually visited, but is said to have an authoritarian system that claims to rule in the name of the proletariat. A-Io has dissent in its borders, including a few different oppositional left-wing parties, one of which is closely linked to the rival society of Thu. When a revolution is sparked in Benbili, the third major, yet undeveloped, area of Urras, A-Io invades the Thu-supported revolutionary area, generating a proxy war.
The moon, Anarres, represents a more idealist ideological structure: anarcho-syndicalism. The Anarresti, who call themselves Odonians after the founder of their political philosophy, arrived on Anarres from Urras around 200 years ago. In order to forestall an anarcho-syndicalist rebellion, the major Urrasti states gave the revolutionaries the right to live on Anarres, along with a guarantee of non-interference (the story is told in Le Guin’s “The Day Before the Revolution“). Before this, Anarres had had no permanent settlements, apart from some mining facilities.
The Dispossessed (in later printings titled The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia) is a 1974 anarchist utopian science fiction novel by American writer Ursula K. Le Guin (<<), set in the fictional universe of the seven novels of the Hainish Cycle (e.g., The Left Hand of Darkness).
It won the Hugo, Locus and Nebula Awards for Best Novel in 1975. It achieved a degree of literary recognition unusual for science fiction due to its exploration of themes such as anarchism (on a satellite planet called Anarres) and revolutionary societies, capitalism, and individualism and collectivism. (wiki)
On October 5, 2021, it was announced that 1212 Entertainment and Anonymous Content would adapt the novel into a limited series.
TimeSpace Warps 