Send message to Filmmakers

Film short abstract

In the USA, ICE and for-profit companies track asylum seekers and migrants through a GPS device strapped to their ankle or wrist, or facial recognition. “Digital Detention” is filmed in collaboration with those living under constant surveillance in Austin, Texas, a city transformed by the tech boom.

Film synopsis

Across the USA, every day, hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers and migrants are tracked through a GPS device strapped to their ankle or wrist, or facial recognition, as they await their case determination. This deployment of for-profit surveillance technologies creates a parallel system to the booming detention system that makes the USA the country with the largest immigrant detention population in the world.

Digital Detention shows how these technologies spread surveillance into communities, homes and workplaces, forming a for-profit, continuous expansion of detention, which guarantees major revenues to one of the world’s largest prison corporations that benefits both from the expansion of detention facilities and from their so-called alternatives. This public/private partnership imposes a significant financial cost on US taxpayers and a considerable human toll on migrants, their family members and larger community.

The larger Digital Detention project and collaboration originates in an anthropological research project by Carolina Sanchez Boe, initiated in 2019. The documentary film (2026) is created in collaboration with monitored asylum seekers, community activists and lawyers in Austin, Texas, a city which is itself rapidly transformed by the tech industry, with lasting effects on its communities. Confinement and migration control are often laboratories for what is to come later for the general population, and the film shows how these extractive for-profit models of surveillance capitalism concern us all.

Send message to Filmmaker

Film short abstract

Olof and the Aliens is an experimental ethnoscience-fiction film co-created with Olof, a film enthusiast with an intellectual disability. The film follows Olof's story as imagination, collaboration, and creativity become tools for navigating disability access, care, and inclusion.

Film synopsis

Olof and the Aliens is a experimental ethnoscience-fiction film co-created with Olof, a film enthusiast with an intellectual disability who is in contact with extraterrestrial beings. Blending documentary observation with speculative fiction, the film follows Olof as he constructs a sci-fi universe that becomes a way of navigating everyday life, care, and collaboration.

The film shows how one of Olof’s imaginative tales comes to life when he meets Leonie, a medical anthropologist committed to helping him fulfill his dream of creating a science fiction movie. Inspired by Olof’s world-making, the film treats imagination as a space where lived experience, fantasy, and authorship are negotiated collectively. The result is a hybrid cinematic form that combines ethnographic material with DIY sci-fi to tell the story of Olof and illustrate the transformative potential of collaboration, community, and creativity in addressing questions of disability access and inclusion.