A Bright Future (Un futuro brillante) had its world première at Tribeca 2025, 5 June
18-year-old Elisa Vick (excellent newcomer Martina Paseggi) would appear to have A Bright Future (Un futuro brillante) ahead of her. In the opening sequence of director Lucía Garibaldi’s film of that name which she co-wrote with Federico Alvarado, the rosacea-cheeked teenager is interviewed by a panel of adults who ask her a series of questions and set her certain specified tasks – and despite the apparent arbitrariness of the process and the diffidence of her responses (“independence is necessary – sometimes”), she is informed at the end that she has been successful and will, after completing four adaptation appointments, be transferred to the North.
By the time she has got back on her moped to her home town of Los Zorzales, a banner congratulating her has already been raised. After all, traveling North is the ultimate goal and an incredible privilege. Young people, if appropriately skilled, are selected for it – indeed Elisa’s beloved older sister Amanda transferred there some time earlier, making Elisa the youngest person left in a town that is otherwise ageing – while older folk like Elisa’s mother Nélida (Soledad Pelayo) work extras shifts to raise money to enter an annual lottery that might see them also winning a golden ticket North. Indeed Nélida would like nothing more than to live under the same roof with both her daughters again – while Elisa herself, inquisitive, thoughtful and skeptical, seems more questioning, even hesitant about her approaching departure, and starts to wonder what makes the North so much better than the South.
Meanwhile, down a desolate road and beyond a guarded checkpoint, there is, even further south than the South, the uninhabited wasteland of the ‘Deep South’, said to be plagued by infection and deadly evolved ants. It is a place of myth and superstition which few wish to visit, but which Elisa’s uncle Andrés (Alfonso Tort) enters regularly – after signing a safety waiver – to scavenge for goods and canned foods that he can sell on in his shop. As a candidate for the North, Elisa is not allowed to join Andrés on his dangerous missions, but again, she is curious. Indeed her curiosity is precisely what makes her so well suited to the North, where keen young minds, able to think outside the box, are the desired workforce – and while she will begin to resist her own selection, her very rebelliousness serves only to make her a more attractive choice for the posting.
The title of Garibaldi’s A Bright Future is polysemic. For while on the one hand it refers to the supposedly utopian nature of Elisa’s prospects in the North, and conversely to the dystopian nature of her present life down South, it also advertises a young woman’s promise as she comes of age. This is, certainly, a dystopian film, although the future world that it depicts is shabbily ordinary, despite intimations of a post-apocalyptic dispensation. Here there is media talk of ecological disaster; here apartment blocks are fumigated every week with a thick green gas; here dogs and birds have died out and the constantly audible sound of their barking, crowing and chirping in fact comprises archived recordings pumped through speakers all over town; here any sort of unauthorised travel is viewed as highly dangerous; and here ants – an object of absolute, abject terror – are said to be a massing, man-eating menace, even though they appear to behave just like, well, ants.
Unlike most cinematic dystopias, this one is not ruled over by guns, violence and black-shirted oppression, but is rather presented as an insidiously conformist system to which almost everyone is willingly subscribed, and which nearly everyone polices. The system’s fascism is present, but subtle. Elisa has been chosen to go North in part for her relatively high IQ, but others of similar intelligence, like Andrés’ boyfriend, have previously been passed over for their disability or mental illness. Meanwhile Nélida and other occupants of the same apartment complex secretly, pettily band together to report Elisa’s new neighbour Leonor (Sofia Gala Castiglione) to the authorities for her perceived sexual promiscuity. In an ageing population, sexual desire, though not exactly outlawed, is typically met with tutting disapproval and has to be sublimated. Indeed, clandestine groups of townsfolk are willing to pay for just a whiff of the sweaty youth that they have long since left behind and only Elisa still has. Elisa may be the future, but she also embodies her town’s lost past, like a scent-triggered memory of what once was and (by implication) will never be again.
Meanwhile there are hints that this closed community has been gaslit, Dogtooth-style, and that many of its most entrenched beliefs about the world beyond – about the extinct pets and deadly ants – are convenient myths established by those in charge to maintain a manageable decline. Elisa’s rites of passage involve her negotiation of this surreal world, where escaping her own destined trajectory will involve precisely the sort of lateral thinking, self-sacrifice and open-minded curiosity that, ironically enough, the agents of the North expect of her. As Elisa gets drunk for the first time, has her first brush with sex, and comes to realise the undeniable yet fleeting power of her youth, this is her awakening, and her discovery of who she is and wants to be. Elisa might even, for all her recalcitrance, be headed towards a bright future.
Meanwhile, Garibaldi’s lo-fi sci-fi is a strange, beautiful allegory, tracking not only Elisa’s emergence into adulthood on her own terms, but also the typically one-way traffic from the Global South to the North, where the dream of a better life so often ends in disappointment, exploitation and alienation.
Strap: In Lucía Garibaldi’s surreal dystopia, a girl comes of age with integrity as she leaves behind her ageing town for possibilities elsewhere
© Anton Bitel
