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Sleep Dealer

Tuesday, December 3, 2019 @ 7PM
HUB 132 Flex Theatre
Alex Rivera (2008, U.S., 90 min.)

In 2008, Facebook was only four years old and had a mere 100 million worldwide users (compared to more than 2.3 billion today). YouTube was only three years old and known mostly for amusing cat videos. The idea of using drones for military purposes, let alone as a routine part of civilian daily life, was still in its infancy.

And yet, somehow, visionary filmmaker Alex Rivera was able to anticipate even then so much about how all of these technologies would evolve alongside our existing national conversations about immigration, workers’ rights, natural resource privatization and more to produce his low-budget, multiple Sundance Award-winning, sci-fi masterpiece Sleep Dealer with its terrifying prescience about the direction our world is moving. In the film, Rivera imagines a future in which all U.S. borders are closed to immigration yet foreign workers continue to perform labor remotely via robotic connections — “all the work without the workers,” as one character notes. After Memo Cruz’s home is destroyed in an attack, he travels to Tijuana with dreams of working in the high-tech labor factories, even though workers there often work until the point of collapse. Along the way, he meets the mysterious Luz who is trying to use him for her own reasons, in a world where memories are monetized (much as “influencers” try to monetize their lives on Instagram and YouTube today). A mind-blowing, satirical look at modern labor and the uses of people, this film will change how you think about people’s relationships to the land and asks you to consider what it is we really are arguing about in our recent debates over U.S. immigration policy.

Adventurous, ambitious and ingeniously futuristic, ‘Sleep Dealer’ is a welcome surprise. It combines visually arresting science fiction done on a budget with a strong sense of social commentary in a way that few films attempt, let alone achieve.

Kenneth Turan

Film Critic, Los Angeles Times