Screening: "Sleep Dealer"
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 U.S.
Alex Rivera conceived of the story for the film in the late 1990s when antiimmigrant 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.
35mm, color, 89 min. Director: Alex Rivera. Screenwriter: Alex Rivera, David Riker. With: Luis Fernando Peña, Leonor Varela, Jacob Vargas.
Admission is free. No advance reservations. Your seat will be assigned to you when you pick up your ticket at the box office. Seats are assigned on a first come, first served basis. The box office opens one hour before the event.
The fraught and highly dependent relationship between humans and technology is fundamental to the science fiction film. In futures where humans must sacrifice their identity, both mental and physical, to support the hyper-productivity of a techno-capitalist world order that finds them disposable, humanity and the mechanical become intertwined. In these worlds, memories of history and dreams of a homelife and homeland are haunting symbols of what makes humans unique in their desire for love, passion, nurturing family lineage and self-determination.
Notes by Maya Montañez Smukler
For more information, visit https://cinema.ucla.edu/events/2024/11/03/sleep-dealer-advantageous
This event is organized by the UCLA Film and Television Archive and cosponsored by El Cine and the CSRC.