Drone (2022) dir. Sean Buckelew

Independent animator Sean Buckelew’s hand-drawn shorts find clever ways of commenting on technology’s increasing role in our society. His latest film, Drone, imagines what would happen if an autonomous Predator drone went rogue and refused to carry out its missile-launching directives. Ahead of the film’s release next month, we’re excited to present an exclusive online preview of this sly satire about drones, sentience, and the perception-altering strategies employed by both the CIA and public relations agents. In 2013, a former military general published an op-ed titled “Predator and Reaper drones are misunderstood, says manufacturer,” in The Guardian. According to Buckelew, in it he described “how the drone program had a bad image and was in need of a full rebrand.” It was an idea Buckelew found amusing and as time went by, it slowly germinated into Drone’s main focus. By 2017, Buckelew’s script was in full swing: a pithy blend of Mary Shelley’s soulful Frankenstein and Stanley Kubrick’s witty Dr. Strangelove commenting on “the social and cultural politics of emerging technology.”