WHO SHE IS

• A frontline witness with a camera. A documentary filmmaker who follows the shadow lines of modern warfare. Where violence is remote, accountability is obscured, and trauma lingers long after the strike.

• Director of films like National Bird (2016), Enemies of the State (2020) and Reality Winner (2021). Her documentaries chronicle and examine the least visible dimensions of conflict: drones, algorithms, surveillance states. They follow whistleblowers, analysts, soldiers, and civilians caught inside the machinery of endless wars and the costs they are designed to hide. Vital for an age of autonomous war.

• Kennebeck operates at the intersection of journalism, cinema, and moral inquiry, revealing how modern conflict reshapes not only geopolitics, but the inner lives of those who survive it. On either side. 

INVISIBLE BATTLEFIELDS

• Wars are fought on the frontlines. Kennebeck, instead trains her lens on the borders within. Her films trace the veiled arc of trauma. The PTSD of drone operators who never leave Nevada, the families living under constant aerial surveillance, the whistleblowers who expose classified truths and pay with exile, imprisonment, silence.

• In films like National Bird, she uncovers how drone warfare fractures responsibility. Operators see targets as pixels. Civilians hear the constant hum of death overhead. Both live in fear.

• No declarations of war. No clear end. Only persistent surveillance, dot-sized targets and moral injury that seeps, or cracks into everyday life. Kennebeck’s filmmaking unpacks the war machine. Builds proximity where systems enforce distance. Visualises what modern warfare has been coded to hide. 

SURVEILLANCE STATES

• At the core of Kennebeck’s work are whistleblowers—individuals who rupture secrecy in order to restore the truth. These aren’t stories of triumphant heroes. They are stories of isolation, persecution, and psychological toll. Of lives lived under constant watch. Of exile in one’s own country.

• In Kennebeck’s hands, surveillance is not abstract furniture. It is a lived condition. A reminder that in the modern security state, seeing is power. And being seen, therefore, may be vulnerable.

UNCOMFORTABLE QUESTIONS

• Drone warfare promises precision. Surveillance promises safety. But Kennebeck asks what these promises cost. What happens when killing becomes bureaucratic? When algorithms flag threats faster than ethics can evaluate them? When accountability dissolves across chains of command, classification, and automation?

• Her films confront the paradox of technological warfare. i.e. the more ‘efficient’ it gets, the easier it becomes to wage endlessly. Without pause. 

• And then there are the deeper questions. If war can be fought without risk to one side, what restrains it? If trauma is distributed unevenly, who should bear responsibility? If truth depends on those willing to sacrifice their freedom what does that say about democracy?

• Kennebeck does not offer easy resolutions. She insists instead on moral discomfort. On staying with the unresolved. On listening to those the system would rather forget or worse, erase.

AT SYNAPSE

Sonia Kennebeck will take us inside the hidden architecture of modern conflict. Where drones, surveillance, and secrecy reshape how violence is conducted and remembered. She will explore how distance thins responsibility, how trauma persists without spectacle, and how truth can still be chased, investigated and presented to the world. And in an age where war is everywhere and nowhere, make the case for why it must be done. 

Previous Next