‘Nobody believes in the future any more’: Adam Curtis and Ari Aster on how to wake up from the post-truth nightmare

Paranoia is exploited to control us. Movies are groomed to flatter us. And trauma has been twisted to make us blame ourselves. How can we make sense of our lives? The two film-makers try to navigate the chaos

Ari Aster's new movie, Eddington, pits Joaquin Phoenix against Pedro Pascal as men with conflicting takes on how to get their small town through the crisis of Covid. It's also a film about the contemporary political crisis in the US and the influence of technology on our lives.

Adam Curtis's latest documentary series, Shifty, covers similar themes but through the lens of British life in the Thatcher years of the late 1970s to early 1990s. This era, he argues, put in place a substantial shift in power away from the individual and the nation state, changes that are still playing out today.