Sleep Dealer
with director Alex Rivera in personAlex Rivera's near-future dystopian sci-fi film from 2008 follows a Mexican gig worker wired into a cybernetwork to complete virtual work in the US.
Hop Film Now
Sleep Dealer is the story of Memo (Luis Fernando Peña), who must leave his family's homestead in Oaxaca after it is destroyed by a multinational corporation controlling the local water supply. Memo travels to Tijuana and finds a job in a factory where humans are wired to a cybernetwork through nodes attached to their bodies in order to complete virtual work across the border in the US.
Alex Rivera conceived of the story for the film in the late 1990s when anti-immigrant and border control rhetoric had reached a level of hysteria that coincided with the internet's promise of creating a global village through a simple network connection. In this version of the future, easy telecommuting labor is made possible by the expendable remote Mexican worker. Memo meets Luz (Leonor Varela), a coyotech, an early social media influencer type, who sells migrants' memories to a subscriber fanbase. Their relationship forces him to struggle with questions of morality in a dystopian world where a hardware semiconductor is the preferred method of human "connection."
In 2021, Rivera was the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Award in recognition of his film and media work, in documentaries and narrative form, that focus on migration, human rights and the failure of immigration policies. Sleep Dealer, as a fictional film, continues to anticipate the present reality of the precarious nature of gig work, the threat to civil liberties of drone surveillance and the function of a border wall to prevent connection between all global citizens.
Introduction by director Alex Rivera and Professor Matthew Garcia.
Part of the Children of Cuaron: Speculative Fiction Through Cinematic Futures Conference, sponsored by the Department of Latin American, Latino & Caribbean Studies.
D: Alex Rivera, Mexico, English/Spanish, 2008, 1h30m
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