SCIENCE fiction, long a vehicle for political satire, is imagina tively served in Alex Rivera’s Spanish-
language “Sleep Dealer,” which won a prize for screenwriting at last year’s Sundance Film Festival.
The setting is Mexico of the near future, which has been walled off from the United States — though its residents still “commute” to work across the border.
They do this by having themselves implanted with nodes that allow them to provide cheap labor by manipulating robots around the world — including London cabbies.
Memo (Luis Fernando PeÑa) seeks work as a California welder-by-proxy after his curiosity about the world triggers a tragedy in his dusty Mexican hometown.
He attracts the attention of Luz (Leonor Varela), a writer who performs his implant and gets him a job at a factory where Mexicans “work” as “sleep dealers” until they literally drop from exhaustion.
Luz also supports herself by auctioning stories on a Web-based network she connects to through her own nodes.
A mysterious customer is extremely interested in Memo and his background, so she draws out her new friend.
The sleep dealers are part of a new multi-
national economy that includes the selling of water — in dollars — to Memo’s parched hometown and “aqua-terrorists” who seek to liberate natural resources.
Rivera’s ambitious vision and sharp script is somewhat compromised by his extremely low budget and PeÑa’s charisma-free performance.
“Sleep Dealer” is still far more worth seeing than most of what’s out there.
SLEEP DEALER
You won’t nod.
In Spanish, with English subtitles. Running time: 90 minutes. Rated PG-13 (violence, sexuality). At the Empire and the Village East.