Xavier Casanovas. Dystopian fiction is in fashion right now. You don’t have to be particularly learned in the subject area to realise that it is simply a projection of what frightens us most: the end of time – or at least, the end of normality as we know it- it is a fiction that has become more credible now than ten or twenty years ago. Ecocide, the collapse of civilisation and epidemics are all over the headlines and are helping us to believe that for our society, in its current form, time is running out.

In 2006, Alfonso Cuarón, the Oscar-winning director of Mexican cinema, made an untimely dystopian movie. Let’s just say it went too far. Although it is true that the fall of the twin towers, Islamic terrorism, and the start of the war in Iraq made people think of the collapse of civilisation, the dynamics of our model of progress and economic growth remained sufficiently unchanged so that we did not need to question any cultural assumptions of our Western society. Maybe this is why the film was not a box office success and went largely unnoticed. We were not ready to listen to what Cuarón wanted to tell us. Yet over time, it has become a cult film and now appears in several lists of the best movies of the first twenty years of the twenty-first century. We are talking about “Children of Men”. (more…)