Sleep Dealer with Alex Rivera
Saturday, 10:00 pm, Regal Downtown #4
Director: Alex Rivera
Writer: Alex Rivera, David Riker
Cinematographer: Lisa Rinzler
Cast: Leonor Varela, Jacob Vargas, Luis Fernando Peña
Running Time: 90 min
Writer/director Alex Rivera is a digital media artist and filmmaker. Of Peruvian extraction, but reared in New York, his previous video projects (several of which will screen in the program The Sixth Section and Other Videos) addressed themes of globalization, identity, and the international reach of technology. These are also the themes of Sleep Dealer, his first feature, co-written with David Riker, award-winning screenwriter of La Ciudad (1998).
In the film’s (very) near future, the U.S.-Mexico border has been closed; instead of immigrating to work in U.S. factories, Mexicans workers are implanted with “nodes,” (reminiscent of The Matrix) enabling the Mexican workers to control robots in factories around the world. The developed world can then make use of Mexican labor without worrying about the cultural and social dislocations of immigration.
Memo Cruz is a young man from a tiny traditional village that is struggling for water because, in the world of corporate-controlled resources, a dam has cut off the river that once flowed freely through the town. Villagers must then buy company water, disconnected from the formerly free resource that had always been theirs. Trying to use a radio to find his friends, Memo instead catches the attention of water company security, who mistake Memo and his family for “aqua-terrorists.” Company drone planes destroy the farm and kill Memo’s father, forcing Memo himself to head for Tijuana, the center of the “node” economy, to support his family.
Before he can even plug himself in, he meets Luz, a freelance writer; she, in turn, introduces him to the “memory economy.” Luz, in need of money, uses her node connection not to manipulate distant robot arms, but to offer her memories, however mundane, to be sold like music downloads. She finds a mysterious customer who wants to buy only her memories of Memo. The identity of this customer and his motivations moves the plot to a surprisingly upbeat conclusion for what is otherwise a dark vision of the future.
Sleep Dealer offers trenchant commentary on today’s issues of globalization, immigration, privacy, and unregulated capitalism. One of Rivera’s most striking insights is that high-paying high-tech jobs (at least as he envisions them) can create the same exploitation and dependency as the low-wage, low-skill jobs of today, and may do more to deprive workers of privacy and identity, once they are plugged into the system.
