Tribeca Film Festival ’25: A Bright Future — The Fight To Be Dirty in A Sterile Society

Image Source: https://tribecafilm.com/films/bright-future-2025

To bite the bullet that we all so often would prefer to not talk about, Lucía Garibaldi’s A Bright Future (2025) reminds me of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. But what it brings to mind is not necessarily the fears of the time —  masking, leaving packages in the garage for two weeks, testing myself and quickly after my grandparents every time I experienced a slight sore throat while one mutation after another presented itself. Rather, it brings to mind the overlap that the dystopian society Garibaldi presents to us has with the work-from-home environment that the pandemic pretty much singlehandedly pushed into the mainstream. A Bright Future’s dystopia is built on the bones of our elite’s insistence on maintaining production, especially as the world around us rots and people die, and the conditioning that has led us to accept and even embrace this.

The South is uninhabitable. Wrecked by environmental disaster, the elites of Garibaldi’s society have all centered around the North and almost everyone else has been pushed into the areas bordering the North and the South. But the elites of this society have dangled an apple from the tree of this clear class divide — a promise of what they present as a version of class mobility. There are two ways to be sent to work in the North; for the old, by winning a state auction to be sent to work in the North (which, by no accident, sets this “apple” in the eyes of the people as a prize to be fought over with capital) and the other, for the young, by being deemed fit by the state of work in the North (which sets a standard that is controlled by the state for who you must be in order to obtain this upward mobility). 

While a clear danger already presents itself in the premise of this push for continuing production over the wellbeing of the people in society, Garibaldi takes it further. The real threat finds itself to be what comes as a result of this — the suppression of individuality in order to achieve the transformation of people into the ideal means of production necessary for this mindset to survive. Worse, the eugenicist tones of the society in A Bright Future are underscored by an almost more haunting acceptance and even eagerness of the people to assimilate into this ideal at the promise of mobility.

As Elisa, our protagonist played by Martina Passeggi, progresses through the series of tests to be selected to go through the North, we find the test administrators to continue to look for increasingly obvious eugenicist dogwhistles. They look for someone that is young, they state that Elisa has perfect genetics, we learn that bipolar people and, by extension, presumably others with mental health issues are functionally unable to get into the North no matter what their IQ is. The selection and cultivation of this kind of person that is the ideal of this world — the person who will be allowed to be in the inhabitable world and, therefore, will have the higher chance at survival — will create an increasingly sterile society. One within which, eventually, only those who pass this standard of what a person should be will survive.

The psychological cultivation by the elites in A Bright Future’s society is indicative of the reason behind their society’s systematic push towards survival. We learn through Elisa’s tests that their standards for the “good ones” amongst the poor are people that are non-reactionary towards things that they are presented with. But the cultivation is never just the individual mind. It is in the resulting mindset of the people subjugated by this incentivized assimilation into these standards. The almost more sinister aspect of this is the conditioning of the lower class society to accept the conditions that they have been given without questioning why it must be this way while also creating a desire to become what they are expected to be. “Hope is the dream of those who are awake,” as Elisa’s mother, played by Soledad Pelayo, tells her. An ironic statement on nearly every front — especially when the hope that Elisa is speaking of is one of class mobility that the upper class is “gifting” to the best amongst them. As a result of this societal conditioning comes the death of individuality and the little quirks and flaws that make us human — and in a way lead to the death of our organic beings as we are turned into and bred to be outputs of productivity. It does not matter that the world as we know it is becoming uninhabitable and increasingly dangerous for us to live within. As our real world emergence of work-from-home during the pandemic taught us, what matters is that we continue to output.

The purchase of a puppet dog with “real Labrador hair” in the very beginning of the film is one of the first implications of this stripping and sterilizing of our value as organic beings. The implication being that, while there are dogs, the animals that were once man’s best friends have been turned into a means of production for something that is merely a facsimile of themselves. A perfected product that is entirely controlled and crafted by the hands of the people that form the puppets to be whatever species that will sell— regardless of what breed the hair actually comes from.

It’s only natural then that, in the undergrounds of this society that has conditioned the worth of the youth to be material, that a fetish and an obsession with the proverbial fountain of youth thrives. Elisa, at the suggestion of the new neighbour, Leonora — a smoker and an amputee with a mysterious background in regards to the North — plunges into a world of an odd form of sex work. One where she does not bathe and eats garlic in order to be able to sell the “smell of her youth” to buyers. 

It could be easy to interpret the film as endorsing the exercising of agency through sex work as the act of rebellion against the capitalist status quo. However, I think that the real act of rebellion that the film presents to us comes in a pair — the first being the thematic act of being defiantly dirty in a world that is being sanitized, and the second being the more literal act of finding those to exist in the dirt with you. Aside from the literal interpretation of the word “dirty” of Elisa and Leonora’s dedication to keeping themselves unclean in order to profit off of their smell for Elisa’s escape, to be dirty in this film is to be imperfect in the eyes of the North. To be dirty is also the built in escape from becoming a moving piece in the work to maintain the status quo. To me, this form of sex work is not just sex work. It’s indicative of an underlying, hypocritical wish for the uncleanliness of humanity even in what the youth that these people are conditioned to see as commodities. There’s beauty in the stink. There’s beauty in the leg that Leonora amputated in order to escape the North. There’s beauty in the rosacea on Elisa’s cheeks.

But it seems to me that the larger part of Garibaldi’s reflections in growing up in a world like this is that to actively be dirty is to refuse to believe in this society that we are presented with. Elisa is the model of what the North wants. Her only difference is that she is happy with the life that she has built in her neighborhood. She thrives within it, and actively wishes to stay in it despite the North’s insistence on choosing her to be sent to work for them. But even those who do not wish to partake in the consumption of the youth in this society, too, have an underlying desire for the uncleanliness of humanity

Elisa declares that, “Youth is a nightmare.” If hope is the dream for those who are awake, then youth is the nightmare. Because youth is fundamentally messy and challenging as it matures. And one of Elisa’s greatest strengths is her youthful determination to retain her own agency in a society that is attempting to strip her of it. But in this nightmare and in this mess, she finds Leonora — who she connects with because of their shared angst towards the North. Commiserating with each other is how they find their rebellion. And, while it provides neither of them clarity on their life and world, they are drawn to each other because they share this uncleanliness. If eugenics is the tool of the capitalist oppressor, then A Bright Future finds that community is what stands opposite to that. Community, after all, is the most fundamental part of humanity. And perhaps it is the only thing that can prevent us from losing our individuality. 

Lucía Garibaldi’s 2025 feature, A Bright Future, while flawed, is a testament to what you can do with a low budget. The execution, the performances, and the thought in the film find itself just as brilliant as the title proclaims against the background of a world whose story is either dumped to us or glossed over with thematic, interpretation based answers. But my hope is that this film encourages more young filmmakers to make that dystopian, sci-fi film and to explore the thoughts that arise out of the incomparable situations that today’s youth have lived through. Let it be messy. We wouldn’t have art without the imperfections that come with it.