“A sharp analysis of the digitization of our borders and the dangers that this brings for all of us.”

The eye in the sky is always watching…

With migration increasingly becoming a hot political topic in both the US and Europe, border security has become big business. But who is actually securing those borders? Or rather, what is? Because technology is encroaching on the tasks of border patrol, increasing surveillance at a rapid pace. Drones, robots, artificial intelligence, the perfect tools not just for protection, but for oppression. And to make money. In Kenya-Jade Pinto’s debut The Sandbox, she takes a hard look at our borders and how the use of technology in the monitoring of migrants could very well be our future. Though Pinto bites off more than she can chew and sometimes shifts the focus too much to the plight of migrants regardless of the use of technology, The Sandbox is a sharp analysis of the digitization of our borders and the dangers that this brings for all of us.

A film about high tech deserves a high-tech look, and Pinto delivers with crisp images and scenes peppered with drone shots and other footage from sources that weren’t necessarily human-operated. This sleek look complements the cold and impersonal approach the manufacturers and users of technology take towards the subjects they monitor. These are people who only have numbers on the mind, either in the form of dollars made or migrants seized. At a Border Security Expo they show their wares with gleaming eyes, never thinking about the consequences to human life the use of their products can and will have. In a Greek migrant detention center, Pinto gets into a semantic discussion with the center’s director over what constitutes ‘monitoring’, as he tries to evade questions about invading the privacy of the detainees. An anonymous woman in Kenya’s ‘Silicon Savannah’ explains how she shapes training data that is used by big tech to improve self-driving cars and other forms of AI application, annotating footage of surveillance cameras. Africa, the continent where most migrants coming to Europe originate, has seen a shift in Western NGO operations, as systems designed to provide aid have slowly turned into systems of surveillance, collecting people’s fingerprints and iris scans for shadowy reasons. What Pinto shows is that all of these examples have a role to play in a large ecosystem, without any of them getting a full view of the system itself outside of big tech and governments, who have created a training ground for mass surveillance. One expert warns us that this surveillance will someday reach us all. As one of the chapter headings in the film says, “Europe is trying to create a black box“, a succinct statement that shows the ecosystem created is deliberately obfuscated. Why?

Pinto tries to find an example in the Mediterranean, where Europe is pushing its borders into the sea. The film follows one of the vessels of Sea-Watch, a German NGO whose goal it is to find ships in distress and rescue their occupants. After air reconnaissance they spot a small boat carrying some 40-odd people, and it becomes a race to see who gets to these people first: them or Frontex, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, which also patrols the sea to push back the boats into the hands of traffickers in North Africa or to take migrants into custody and put them in detention camps where they may or may not be monitored, depending on your definition. And sometimes this goes horribly wrong. In June 2023 the Adriana, a ship with more migrants than it could carry, sank off the coast of the Greek island of Pylos. According to survivors this mishap was caused by the Greek coast guard when it tried to tow the ship to shore, something the coast guard denies. One of them says he saw a drone in the sky and is convinced it caused the ship to sink, but this is never substantiated.

Once the filmmaker goes out to sea on the Mediterranean, The Sandbox loses focuses and starts to shift from a documentary about the invasive technology used to monitor migrants to a story about the migrants themselves, thereby moving away from its unique viewpoint and becoming one in a sea (no pun intended) of many. It muddles the film’s message when it didn’t have to. The film does something similar earlier when it follows a group of volunteers into the Sonoran Desert in search of migrants trying to cross into the US, to help them and provide them with water and supplies; all they find are human remains. But in this case Pinto combines the footage with drone shots, while the people on-screen explain that they are constantly being observed, so it connects to the angle of technology watching us. Without a doubt Pinto is a talented documentarian, with a thorough approach and a good feel for rhythm, placing well-composed shots for reflection at a steady pace, like the clicks of a metronome. An interesting and timely documentary, The Sandbox threatens to get sand in its engine towards the finish line, but still builds a compelling image of a world in which we are increasingly watched by an emotionless machine.