Free Film Screening: Sci-Fi Meets Immigration Debate in Award Winning Sleep Dealer
University of Arizona Department of Spanish and Portuguese presents
FREE SCREENING: Sci-Fi Meets Immigration Debate in award winning film
This screening is part of the 21st Annual Graduate and Professional Symposium on Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literature, Language, and Culture
SLEEP DEALER, 2008, USA/Mexico, 90 mins.
In Spanish with English subtitles
IN PERSON: DIRECTOR ALEX RIVERA (Q&A and post screening reception)
Friday, February 18th, 7PM
Grand Cinemas Crossroads
4811 East Grant Road (Grant & Swan)
Adventurous, ambitious and ingeniously futuristic, "Sleep Dealer" is a welcome surprise. It combines visually arresting science fiction done on a budget with a strong sense of social commentary in a way that few films attempt, let alone achieve... - Kenneth Turan, The Los Angeles Times
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.
— Shari Frilot, Sundance Film Festival
ALEX RIVERA is a New York based digital media artist and filmmaker. His first feature film, SLEEP DEALER premiered at Sundance 2008, and won two awards, including the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award. Rivera is a Sundance Fellow and a Rockefeller Fellow. His work, which addresses concerns of the Latino community through a language of humor, satire, and metaphor, has also been screened at The Berlin International Film Festival, New Directors/New Films, The Guggenheim Museum, PBS, Telluride, and other international venues.
www.sleepdealer.com
This event is made possible with support from Confluence A Center for Creative Inquiry; Hanson Film Institute; Center for Latin American Studies; The Second Language Acquisition and Teaching Program;and the Department of Gender and Women's Studies
If you're in Tucson on Friday, make time for a free screening and meet the filmmakers.
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