Exploring various topics from science fiction to robotics and Artificial Intelligence, fantastic or terrifying sequences, ironic or fairytale-like, were shown on screen, portraying a Future that has now become the Present, in a prophetic journey where films have surprisingly anticipated tools and environments that today characterize our everyday lives. After a prologue focused on films that have now become iconic, the presentation showed a series of film excerpts that offered insights into a range of themes: from technological innovation to virtual reality, from ethical dilemmas to the interplay between eros and machines, from futuristic comedy to natural disasters, and the perennial — but now more pressing than ever — issue of fake news.

In Monda’s narrative, it is fascinating to see how the different sensibilities of very diverse artists have tackled, across various genres, eternal themes such as the relationship between the individual, the community and institutions, and the ambition — much more often the illusion — of shaping and controlling the future. No image, Monda believes, summarizes as powerfully the relationship between the enthusiasm for technological and scientific progress and the realization of what Friedrich Nietzsche called “the eternal return of the same,” as the famous scene of the bone turning into a spaceship in 2001: A Space Odyssey. All of Stanley Kubrick’s genius is contained in that formidable directorial intuition: a simple editing cut transports the viewer from a past thousands of years ago, where some primates confront each other with brutal and primal violence, to a future in which everything appears calm and perfectly under control, but where violence will inevitably return, this time by the onboard computer HAL 9000.