Sleep Dealer

Prediction

Rotten:( (learn more)

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 Rivera�s 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 area�s water supply and is selling it back to the village at outrageous prices, provoking the mobilization of aqua-terrorist cells. But Memo couldn�t 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)

Film Takes Pace.