Ciclo de Cine Radical en Español (Spanish Language Film Series): Sleep Dealer

Sleep Dealer (2008, 90 min.) Mexico. The near future. Memo Cruz has always dreamed of leaving his tiny village and heading north. But when he is ultimately forced to leave, Memo finds a future so bizarre - border walls, shantytowns, hi-tech factories, remote control drones and aqua-terrorists - that it looks a lot like today.

As director Alex Rivera once said, "Why invent a dystopic future for my movie when I could imitate a dystopic present?"

Sleep Dealer is Rivera’s first full-length feature film in which, through a captivating narrative, he presents his dystopian extrapolation of current social, economic and political trends towards the near future with the U.S.-Mexico borderlands serving as a co-protagonist alongside its cybermigrants.

The film is the culmination of over a decade of digital media in which Alex analyzes immigration-related phenomena, such as transnationalism, and exposes and extrapolates the problematics of current nation-state ideologies and policies relative to Latin American labor migrations to the U.S.