Críticas Magazine

Adriana V. Lopez

Adios to Sundance and Hola to Alex Rivera, the Latino George Lucas
January 27, 2008

I remember trying to wrap up my pigtails into Princess Leah buns after first seeing Star Wars as a kid. Later in my more mind-expanding 20’s, Sci-Fi films like Kubrick’s 2001 and Tarkovsky Solyaris would make it difficult for me to wrap my head around the idea of our world in galactic flux. Now there’s a new head-scratching, high-concept Spanish-language film that lends a socio political eye to what technology may bring for the future of immigration and Mexico’s migrant workers.

At this year’s Sundance Film Festival a Latino director with a pertinent message was born. Meet Alex Rivera, a New York native with a Peruvian father and a tech savvy mother, whose debut feature film will also fill the void of working Latino directors in Hollywood. Sleep Dealer is the story of a young Mexican man from a small pueblo who ventures into the big city seeking virtual labor. He plugs into a Tijuana-based computer center where he literally “hooks himself up” to remotely operated worker robots in distant factories. As put by the film’s teaser line the story is “set in the near future, like tomorrow.” You’re transported to a world where flying drones buzz across blue skies sometimes taking aim at innocent civilians and where words like coyotek, nodejob, and cybracero are part of these characters’ jargon. It’s a place where the price of drinking water is controlled by exploitative corporations and where humans are fighting to stay connected with each other without having to plug into machines.

I got to see a preview of Sleep Dealer in New York (Rivera is old amigo of mine) and was left with my jaw on the theater’s floor at the cerebral largeness of this little indie flick that could. This film is also a sensory experience, aside from its moody Mexican hues, you feel like you’re flying with it. It’s dark and creepy, at times silly and slap-sticky, then romantic and melancholy-- all in one.  With Amores Perros’ Lynn Fainchtein as musical supervisor, the soundtrack also features first class Latino hipster music to take you through it. A track from Nortec entitled ‘Sonora Norte’ will provide you with an appropriate dose of acid-trip-accordion-bug-out music for the future. Solid performances by actors Jacob Vargas, Leonor Varela, and Luis Fernando Peña only bolster Rivera’s and his co-writer David Riker’s s ambitious screenplay.  And thanks to some arduous classes at the Actors Studio (I jest), this very blogger’s left eye has a cameo appearance in the film, too. Hint: I’m a computer.

Rivera’s film art has always concentrated itself on Latinos in the States and the culture of immigration. In an interview with Wired, Rivera talked about admiring the-future-is-grim type movies such as Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, though he thinks they provide a narrow view of the real world. "They still have as a protagonist a European man,” said Rivera.  “I wanted to make a movie where the protagonist is a real outsider. You see these futuristic skyscrapers in Minority Report, but I wanted to know: Who is building them? And who is cleaning them?"

Many of you may already have seen Rivera’s documentary The Sixth Section (reviewed in Críticas’ A/V Review in 2003) that looked at how immigrants from Boqueron, Mexico, established a satellite economy and government for their small hometown from where they lived in Newburgh, N.Y. Be sure to check it out if you haven’t at your local library and be prepared for Sleep Dealer, coming to a theater near you….in the near future.

Posted by Adriana V. Lopez on January 27, 2008 | Comments (1)