Author: Cordelia Kenney
On Nov. 4, Oxy Cinematheque screened filmmaker Alex Rivera’s 2008 feature film “Sleep Dealer,” a science fiction film that portrays a future in which Mexican workers perform labor for American companies by manipulating robots from Mexican “virtual reality sweatshops.” The film, which won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival and the Amnesty International Award at the Berlin International Film Festival, was followed by a Q&A session with Rivera, who spent the past week, Oct. 31 through Nov. 4, exploring issues surrounding labor, U.S.-Mexican border policy and the future of border relations with students and faculty.
Rivera, who was invited to Occidental through the Remsen Bird Fund, described the arduous 10-year process it took to make “Sleep Dealer,” his first feature film. “One of the things that kept me going was that it was a chance to do something new,” Rivera said. “Future films are generally imagined in the first world; it has not been done on film in the global south. This was a chance to look at the world with a new point of view.”
The film plays on several prominent themes, including the meaning of identity within a fragmented world, while also contrasting connectedness and distance. In the beginning of the film, the main character Memo remarks, “Santa Ana was a trap. My father lived in memories of it.” For Memo’s father’s generation, identity was intricately linked to the land. Memo, on the other hand, wishes to partake in the supposedly globalized world.
“Sleep Dealer” dramatizes the disconnect between the impersonal, distant world of highly automatized relationships and the extraordinarily intimate, invasive nature of the virtual reality factories known as “sleep dealers.” Nodes implanted directly in the workers’ bodies connect them to the machinery in these sleep dealers. In contrast, Memo’s father remarks, “You don’t even know who you are,” after Memo insists that the world is bigger than living off of the land in Santa Ana.
The name of the “sleep dealer,” or factory, came from Rivera’s reading of “A Seventh Man” by John Berger, which depicts migrant workers in Europe. Rivera described his research process for the film as “organic,” in which he drew from current news stories to books and historical knowledge, including “A Seventh Man.”
“[Futuristic film] almost always goes to default with sliding car doors and skyscrapers,” Rivera said. “They always imagine development.” Steven Spielberg’s 2002 film “Minority Report,” for example, imagines a highly developed Washington, D.C. with improved infrastructure. When creating an image of the future for the south, however, Rivera wanted to more realistically imagine what development could look like. “For every skyscraper that goes up, a mine gets emptied,” Rivera said. Using his organic research method and particular viewpoint of how the future should be portrayed as his framework, Rivera articulates an entirely novel take on the future of a globalized, interconnected world.
His documentary work, in part, informed this portrayal of the development of Mexico in the context of automatization. In 2003, places he visited still lacked running water or paved roads, yet had highly developed communication grids. In Rivera’s imagined future of the “global south,” Mexicans must pay for water, which is guarded by a machine gun attached to a speaker.
As the producer of Rivera’s film, Anthony Bergman, the producer of the 2004 indie sensation “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” Rivera hoped to provide a new view while drawing in a diverse audience. “You think if you make a science fiction film about a Mexican migrant worker everyone’s going to see it. That’s sarcasm,” Rivera joked. “[I tried to give a] wild, relevant, fun, fresh perspective.”
Rivera discussed some of the technicalities of shooting and the long editing process, noting that it is difficult to tell how audiences will receive films. “The grainy, retro futuristic vibe [of the film] is appealing to me,” Rivera remarked. “Sound can completely transform the meaning of the picture,” he added.
As part of the First Tuesday Speaker Series on Social Justice, Rivera also gave a presentation on border policy on Tuesday, Nov. 1. Entitled “The Border Disorder: Films from the Edge of America,” screened parts of his films and discussed current border policy and future realities for trans-border citizens.
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