It’s refreshing when Canadian filmmakers create boldly internationalist documentaries. Kenya-Jade Pinto’s debut feature, The Sandbox, is a prime example. The Toronto-based writer-director’s disturbing film highlights deadly effects of surveillance tools and militarized technologies on asylum seekers on different continents.
Pinto demonstrates that due to infrared screening, drones, iris scanning and other biometrics, automated gates, tethered aerial surveillance, and other technologies, it’s increasingly difficult for genuine refugees to enter the United States and Southern Europe. She also shows that in too many instances, asylum seekers are dying in the southern U.S. desert and on rickety boats crossing the Mediterranean Sea because they’re viewed as a threat rather than as human beings in distress.
Meanwhile, vendors of these newfangled technologies market their wares through trade shows, making a killing. It’s ghoulishly dystopian. And the director, also a lawyer and talented photographer, reinforces the mood with stark imagery of forbidding landscapes and seascapes facing those in search of freedom.
In addition, Pinto documents efforts by committed citizens, including volunteers with the Sea-Watch non-governmental organization, to save lives of those in peril.
The Sandbox is named for ways in which the refugee system produces and destroys at will without facing consequences, just as children might do in a sandbox.
Pinto went through Hot Docs’ Emerging Filmmaker Program and now, her film will have its world premiere at Hot Docs, which runs from April 23 to May 3.
The Sandbox reveals how surveillance expands
Pinto’s documentary opens near Arizona’s boundary with Mexico, where refugees must take increasingly dangerous chances to avoid capture by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. There’s also a lengthy segment on European efforts to restrict undocumented migration across the Mediterranean Sea, including an inside look at a high-tech immigrant-detention centre in Greece.
At one point, a European Commission vice president declares that Frontex—the EU’s border and coast guard service—will become “Europe’s returns agency” with the help of technologies.
“Digital ID programs are being rolled out across the Global South,” Pinto states in one of the most compelling sequences. “This allows the EU to externalize its border.
“Before people can even arrive to the EU’s doorstep, the EU has a digital rap sheet on them,” she adds. “This is a way to make sure that they can keep track of people who haven’t yet reached EU borders but who might try to.”
Pinto dryly comments that these systems are marketed as “tools of inclusion, convenience, [and] efficiency”. Yet according to her, it’s not optional for refugees to register their fingerprints or irises at a refugee camp near the Kenya-Somalia border. If they refuse, they won’t receive food, cash, or medical care.
Infrastructure built on the periphery
To make it all more relevant to middle-class viewers, Pinto adds a lesser-known wrinkle. She maintains that these Orwellian technologies are often evaluated and refined on people “who are out of sight, out of mind in a refugee camp or at a remote part of the border or in the middle of the Aegean Sea”.
“But eventually, that pipeline reaches people like you, people like me,” Pinto emphasizes. “That’s the point. And I think this is a warning that the infrastructure builds on the periphery in camps and in crisis zones is very quietly becoming part of the core, shaping how all of us are moving and living and are being seen.”
The electronic-surveillance society is upon us, as anyone spending hours in an airport can attest. The Sandbox helps illuminate how it happened by connecting the dots in ways that few might have imagined.
Hot Docs will present the world premiere of The Sandbox at 8 p.m. on April 25 at TIFF Lightbox 1. There will be a second screening at 11 a.m. on May 2 in the Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema. For more information and tickets, visit the Hot Docs website. The Toronto Spark is on Bluesky @torontospark.bsky.social.
