Death, dreams and drama are home delivered in Alex Rivera's Sleep Dealer.My dreams for your reality.
By John Esther
Winner of Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award and the Alfred P. Sloan Prize (for science in film) at Sundance Film Festival 2008, Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer is impressive for what must have been a very small budget.
Haunted by his father’s murder, which he accidentally arranged, Memo Cruz (Luis Fernando Peña) heads to Tijuana “the city of the future” in this futuristic film. There he hooks himself up to a world-life system (“nodes”) and works his mechanical arms to the boneless truth of a reality disconnected from natural world around him.
Poignant and apropos, this superb film works out several themes on multiple levels.
Born in 1973 to native of Peru and the United States, the now-New York based media artist and filmmaker grew up in a New Jersey suburbia where assumptions about race, immigration and identity where assumed and under-questioned.
Over the past 15 years, Rivera has explored these issues in his work via the eyes and advent of the technological revolution of our times.
In this exclusive interview, we spoke Rivera about his labor in love and waiting.
JEsther Entertainment: This film has been ready to go since early last year. How does it feel to hold onto it this long and still be discussing it?
Alex Rivera: [Laughs.] I feel a bit like a robot. The film is a labor of love. It took about 10 years to get it done. I’m completely delighted and relieved it’s making it out into the world now. But what I would say is this: ten years ago, when I dreamed of making a science fiction movie in Spanish, with the main character as a migrant worker living in Mexico, who looks outside – and the film would be a way of looking at politics and economics through science fiction – I was joking. I never thought the film would get made. Now 12 years later it’s about to be released in theaters. There are billboards around town. I’m like stunned. I feel like I’m living in film or a virtual reality. It’s a delight.
JE: Which of the characters do you identify with the most and why?
AR: If you wanted to get psychological the three characters are pieces of myself. The one I identify with the most is the journalist (name). I have been making films with the naive hope of changing the world, that are meaningful, connect to economics, that a lot of people in America might not be able to see otherwise. Though her stories and dreams Luz hopes she can tie these things to the world. As an American I know I am tied to the world.
JE: You mentioned filmmaking. Flimmaking is often seen as dream factory. Your title would suggest the marketing of sedation or numbness.
AR: Film is such a beautiful medium. In can do so many wonderful things. But I prefer that silver screen up there not to be an escape hatch into a false reality for ninety minutes. I want that silver screen to be a window where people see something real. Even though this film is a science fiction and a fantasy, I really hope and believe the best part of it is that it is a window into a very possible future.
JE: The way she sells her memories seems to address how our personal and collective historical memories. History is no longer an experience based on empirical data or memory but rather the visual recreation of it by some stranger.
AR: Absolutely. The concept of downloading your memories into a social network is where we will end up. If you look at the history of the camera, the first ones were the size of a building, now they’re the size of a cigarette and can be broadcast around the world. That process isn’t over. Where does it end? It ends with the camera disappearing, with it becoming a part of us. We can share with other people what we see and what we hear. Kodak had that slogan, “Share your memories.” That’s where we’ll end up: anything that can be lived will be recorded and shared. What questions will that raise about privacy, honesty…Will we know when we’re being recorded? We don’t know now; what’s it going to be like 20 years from now?
JE: And our minds may travel across vast spaces yet our bodies remain in a singular area. A person who is only free in his or her mind takes on a new meaning/context. Conversely, Luz is now selling her mind and not her body, which would, or could, be construed as progress.
AR: I am sure there are bizarre gender politics in this movie I haven’t been able to pick up yet. I like the idea of this female character enabling the sort of revolutionary act at the end of the film. It’s by, it seems, doing something as passive as listening or storytelling. That’s the revolutionary act. I like that. I don’t think there are enough badass female protagonists in science fiction.
JE: Where they tend to be extremely objectified – if you look at video imagery. Unless you look at female scientists in movies; but they are usually the best looking scientists one would ever see. Let us talk about the Mexico-U.S. relations in the film.
AR: Sure. I see the relation of Mexico and the U.S. as microcosm for the whole planet. Mexico is part of the so-called developing world. The U.S. has been the most powerful country on the planet. The fact that those two countries share a border produces all kinds of fascinating conflicts that resonate with what is happening around the world.
JE: So a sequel may expand the geopolitics?
AR: I would love to do a sequel connecting Jakarta with Los Angeles, Mumbai to London, the occupied West Bank to New York.
JE: The speed of narrativity increases at Internet connectivity speeds.
AR: I hope the film does not come off as anti-technology. Technology is making the world more connected. It’s destroying distance. Places once isolated from one another are now profoundly connected to the point where you can have a solider living in Las Vegas but bombing in Pakistan, and going home to his family at night for dinner. It’s all happening on remote control. We live in a connected planet. Who is becoming more powerful? That’s the question for me. We can see the way the military is using connectivity. We can see the way corporations use connectivity. How can everyday people use it? And we definitely are. In the elections, crowd sourcing, the financing of elections, in Iraq the cellphone videos of soldiers have been some of the most direct dispatches from the battlefield. That’s an example of normal people using technology to break down barriers. Technology is not good. Technology is not bad. It’s a battlefield. Sleep Dealer is about who’s winning that battle.
JE: The connectivity is there yet where is the physicality? You and I are talking right now at the same table. In the future it may be from our rooms at home, filtered our “people.”
AR: One of the most fun scenes to film is when they make love. They take these jacks to their body. They’re not only able to penetrate each other in the old-fashioned way but to actually see what’s in each other’s minds, too.
JE: Which might not be a good thing if you are not that attracted to your partner.
AR: [Laughs.] You might see in their mind that their thinking about somebody else. That scene was a provocation. Part of the statement of the overall theme of the film is that part of the physicality of who we are is that the sociability of our relationships are not disappearing but our becoming morphed and tweaked by technology and going very strange places.
JE: For my last question -- which goes back to what we were talking about earlier -- what do you think about these interviews where you talk about your work? Does it serve the work? Should the work speak for itself?
AR: I got interested in making films because I don’t think the world is humane and just enough. We live in a world that’s violent and we’re alienated from the violence around us. We don’t see it here. I hope these films attack that world order, but I also hope they’re fun and seductive. That being said, it never hurts to stand by the film and speak about it. It never hurts to speak next to the film and engage in conversation. I love hearing your questions. I’m not somebody who has a vision, I put it on the screen, and that’s the end of the process. I’m a person who tries to listen to the world.
