Sleep Dealer

Rank

Bottom 40% of all time (see others with this rank)

Festival Year

2008 (click here to see all competition films from this year)

Category

Dramatic Competition

Cast

Luis Fernando Pena, Leonor Varela, Jacob Vargas

Non-Cast Credits

Alex Rivera, David Riker, Guy Naggar, Peter Klimt, Anthony Bregman, Lisa Rinzler, Tomandandy, Mark Russell

Description

Gorgeous, intelligent, and intensely imaginative, Alex Riveras stunning first feature, Sleep Dealer, is set in a near future marked by airtight international borders, militarized corporate warriors, and an underground class of node workers who plug their nervous systems into a global computer network that commodifies memory.

Memo Cruz is a young campesino who lives with his family in a town fighting for its life, the small, dusty farm village of Santa Ana del Rio, Oaxaca. A private company has hijacked control of the areas water supply and is selling it back to the village at outrageous prices, provoking the mobilization of aqua-terrorist cells. But Memo couldnt care less about Santa Ana. He loves technology and dreams of leaving his small pueblo to find work in the hi-tech factories of the big cities in the north. He dreams of becoming a node worker and learns how to build his own transmitter, which he uses to hack into the lives of others and live vicariously. One night, he stumbles across a transmission destined to pave the way to the city of the future, but in a way Memo could never have expected.

Burning with visual energy and originality, Sleep Dealer is a fascinating and prescient work of science fiction that is as politically engaged as enjoyable to watch.

Reviewer

Shari Frilot (see other films reviewed by the same reviewer)

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