Taken from the February issue of Dazed & Confused:

“Maja’s Future My Love is a passionate, inventive epistle about the end of days. It’s a rare, lovely, generous, caring, hurt, recovering film, like Adam Curtis meets Star Trek. I loved it.” - Mark Cousins

On a wintry Scandinavian afternoon, Swedish film maker Maja Borg is talking about Floridian utopias. Her debut feature, Future My Love, a lyrical blend of road-trip, love story and documentary, takes her 5,000 miles to the Sunshine State in search of radical ideas. Along the way she tackles the financial collapse, reveals innovative new technologies and studies the complexities of love. And yes, Borg says, these things are all connected, through the vision of 96-year-old “futurist” Jacque Fresco and his Venus Project.

Venus, a lush 22-acre estate with igloo-like modular homes, is the base from which Fresco has been disseminating controversial plans for an alternative future since the 70s – plans which suddenly seem a lot less controversial post global economic meltdown. Borg flew there with her camera to discuss his dreams of banishing money and moving to a resource-based economy where goods, information and energy are free.“Jacque formed these ideas during the great depression of the 30s!” says Borg. “And now we’re in another depression, and we haven’t learned anything from that period. I wanted to talk about why we haven’t been able to change.” She approached the unwieldy topic by imagining the economy as an abusive relationship we can’t seem to break up with. Using her past romance with actress Nadja Cazan (who appears in grainy Super 8), her thoughts on how and why we hurt each other run parallel to how and why we hurt our world.

Born to politically active parents, the 30-year-old grew up in northern Sweden, before moving to Scotland to find bar work to fund her first short, OtticaZero. “I grew up in one of those boring small towns,” she says. “I spent my teenage years in a darkroom I’d created in the basement, and then as soon as I could, I left.” Her first feature was partly fuelled by the cynicism she encountered at art school. “I was quite sad about it. Not caring about society was almost a pride of the MTV generation. So I wanted to do a celebratory piece about someone like Jacque, who dares to say, ‘I want to change the world.’” The result has seen her nominated for the prestigious Michael Powell Award, which champions imagination and creativity in film. “Everyone should know more about the economy,” she says. “It’s dangerous if the only people who understand it are those who are benefiting from it.”

Photography by Caroline Douglas