The Sandbox

Amreen

there are images here that i don’t think will ever leave me. jumping to avoid a fate more brutal than death, a boat overflowing with so much hope that it risks capsizing, songs sung amidst victory, listened to in fleeting moments of safety. boats as liminal spaces amidst endless sea.

Sadia4.0

Depressing, terrifying but brilliant look into the mass surveillance of migrants and asylum seekers, and how Western countries are shirking their ethical and legal responsibilities in basic human rights. STOP GIVING TECH YOUR DATA.

Zachary Goldkind (aka, Chaim Kindergelt)2.0

A well intended albeit frustrating endeavor, its broadened scope interested more in constructing a tone poem on globalized surveillance and military apparatuses than investigating the machinations and political relationships beyond inference and exposition that ensures the montage’s more observational distance remains legible. Again, the very legal, very industrial methodology of producing and distributing what should be shattering experience — watching Libyan slavers paid by the very networks (EU) that enabled their rise to power and the demolition of their country — reduces the capacity for radicality to mere spectacle. When the filmmaker was asked how this film can be used as a call to action, her response was more or less ‘watch this space.’ Is the urgency of screening what should be obviously political work not meant to be tied to the urgency for political action, the push towards both hegemonic/counter-hegemonic forms of reformation/intervention? Are we as audiences really just meant to sit on our hands, say wow, shake our heads, and go on? What uselessness. How can you watch a migrant jump for their lives from Libyan human traffickers, paid for and enabled by the European Union, and just go on, most especially as your country works tooth and nail to formalize greater military and technological ties to that very infrastructure which murders and disappears? Also, and I might be wrong here, I think Jesse Brown was the Q&A moderator and to not confront his bullshit as the artist on stage, when your film implicates the technologies he ideologically defends via the his anti-antizionist screeds… that’s just not using your platform responsibly. Again, that’s IF this was in fact Jesse…Anyways, a disappointing reconfiguration of politic into lugubrious nihilism, but one not interested in naming itself as it is. At another point during the Q&A the filmmaker laments not being able to include certain developments on the Kenyan front due to tight turnaround on delivery, rationalizing it through the fact that many more headlines will unfurl once this project is complete. That’s true, though industrialism certainly shouldn’t stop you, especially if you’re so fixed on it that the regret comes out in a Q&A with greater specificity than where Canadians should direct their outrage.