While we were working together on her film about Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa, director Yaara Bou Melhem was already shooting her debut feature, Unseen Skies. I helped her cut a teaser from the footage of the first shooting stage. A few months later, Participant picked up the project and secured funding.

Unseen Skies was the perfect fit for me, as I am deeply interested in Paglen’s artistic themes: private and public mass surveillance, the global race for space domination, and the rise of artificial intelligence. It’s crazy to think about how dramatically the world has changed since we cut this film back in 2020. Unseen Skies feels now more relevant than ever—a must-watch for anyone interested in the backstory of AI and the ways in which the technologies for warfare and territorial conquest are deeply intertwined with those of image capture.

Francisco Forbes, Editor