A Reconnaissance

On the 30th of April, 2021, Frontex carried out the first test flight of a military surveillance drone from the island of Malta. The continued effort to create an autonomous militarised European border is shrouded in mystery and a lack of information. The film reconnoitres Frontex’s deployment of unmanned drones, flipping between desktop research and an airfield. Where does the so-called Heron 1 patrol above the Mediterranean Sea? What kind of economic structure is supporting it? Starting from a generic email, the film observes seemingly invisible power structures and the landscape that surrounds them. A failed attempt to track the medium-altitude long-range unmanned aircraft casts the filmmaker into a digital glitch—somewhere between Frontex, the military industrial complex and a local planespotting community. What does accelerated technological development at the border of Europe actually look like?