Ancient Beacons Long for Notice is the third installment of a trilogy that explores the history and legacy of the Golden Record. Launched in 1977, this record is attached to NASA’s Voyager I and II space probes, which were designed to explore the outer Solar System. The gold discs contain images, languages, music, and sounds representing the diversity of life and cultures on Earth.

Created by a team of scientists led by Carl Sagan, the Golden Record was a hopeful gesture, carefully curated to present humanity’s “best face forward” in a first-contact scenario with other intelligent life forms; any traces of war, injustice, famine, or environmental decay were intentionally omitted. The film examines the implications of this ethos across time and space through new research on a forgotten document: the earliest audio recording of warfare, made in 1918 on the Western Front of WWI. Robleto’s film asks: “What is our moral obligation to fully account for our actions—the good and the bad—in perpetuity, off-planet, and to beings we have yet to confirm exist?”

Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic Sebastian Smee has called the film “a 21st-century masterpiece,” praising Robleto’s “fresh thinking and dazzling execution.” Combining rare archival material, sound, image, music, and narration, the film unfolds as both documentary meditation and philosophical reckoning. Smee has also described its narration as “deeply poetic,” writing that Robleto “communicates with his heart”—a fitting description of an artist whose work moves fluently between scientific inquiry, historical research, and emotional witness.