Synopsis
Sleep Dealer (2008) is a Mexican-American sci-fi film from director Alex Rivera — watch it online on iFILM. Luis Fernando Peña, Leonor Varela, and Jacob Vargas star in a debut feature that cost three million dollars and imagines globalisation taken to its logical, brutal end.
The border is sealed. No people cross. Instead, workers in Mexico jack network nodes directly into their bodies and operate robots on US construction sites and factory floors from thousands of miles away — their labour exported, their presence unwanted. Memo, a young man from rural Oaxaca, makes it to Tijuana, gets wired into the system, and starts sending his consciousness north while his body sits in a chair. Meanwhile a drone pilot named Rudy, flying strike missions for a private military contractor, picks Memo's family as a target.
Rivera won the Alfred P. Sloan Prize and the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at Sundance 2008. The film holds up because it wasn't predicting a dystopia — it was describing one already in motion, just with the technological layer made visible. Stream Sleep Dealer (2008) online on iFILM.
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