Free to Choose is a speculative sci-fi film that explores the ideology of free-market capitalism through a fragmented, time-travel narrative. Narrated by Milton Friedman, this essay film follows Philip Tose, a former race car driver and CEO, who journeys from post-crash 1997 Hong Kong to the year 2047 to seek a bailout from his future self. The premise unfolds in a parallel reality where time travel functions as a metaphor for credit and economic privilege, available only to those with sufficient access and trustworthiness.

Bahar Noorizadeh is an artist, writer, researcher, and filmmaker, often exploring urban life, finance and economics in her work. In Free to Choose, Noorizadeh explores the central myth of the free market – as efficient, liberating, and harmonious – refracted through layers of fiction, history, and speculation. The film moves through dystopian abstractions, surreal animations, and distorted soundscapes. Scenes of factory labour evoke a generational debt, while the eerie contrast between a ghostly city and a gleaming skyline gestures toward the uneven effects of neoliberalism. A cheerful song overlays this dissonance, complicating any clear moral stance.

Rather than resolving its ideas, this essay film circulates through them, mixing archival references with imagined futures. As an essay film, Free to Choose calls upon visual juxtapositions, narrative loops, and tonal shifts to allow meanings to emerge indirectly, through association and contradiction, inviting reflection without closure.

Free to Choose is part of a larger block on the political-economic transformation of Hong Kong, and its effects