Why the film Cyberpunk Latino 2008 “Sleep Dealer” is still relevant

Militarized water sources. Robot agricultural workers. Marketed memories. Everything is on sale in the characteristic of science fiction of Alex Rivera in 2008 “Sleep Dealer”, in which young workers consumables of the Global South plug into machines that feed the international economy.

Although 17 years have passed since the Latin American film of Cyberpunk made his debut in Sundance – where he won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award and the Alfred P. Sloan Prix – His political relevance has not decreased. At “Sleep Dealer”, international borders are closed, but American companies continue to privatize natural resources and exploit the workers in Mexico, where we find our protagonist, a Tijuana robot operator named Memo Cruz. In an America where immigrants are strongly invoked on for work, but more and more watched, target and expelled quickly without regular procedureThe dystopian domain of “Sleep Dealer” feels closer to our current reality than ever.

“There is a sadness in the reason why the film survives, because its warnings and its ideas on the strangeness of techno-capitalism become more relevant over time,” explains Rivera. “But I am also happy that the film cannot resist the test of time and be used and spoken.”

As an American Peruvian director born in New York, Rivera has drawn her fictitious world from His real experience Documenting the heartbreaking stories of migrants in the United States. Since the release in 2008 of her feature film, Rivera has remained busy: winning a subsidy of MacArthur genius and cultivating the next generation of Latin filmmakers by Borderlands Studios launch at the Sidney Poitier New American Film School. And during all this time, said Rivera, the public of “Sleep Dealer” continued to grow year after year. The film recently screened 35 mm in a house filled at Museum of the Film Academy In Los Angeles, as part of his series “Cyberpunk: consider future possible through cinema”.

When Rivera and I connected via Zoom Call, we felt we had our own dystopian reality in Los Angeles; I had just finished reports on the Forest Fires of Los Angeles and Rivera had returned home to Pasadena after having evacuated from the fire of Eaton. In our latest interview, Rivera discusses the sustainable relevance of his film and what he hopes to inspire viewers today.

This conversation has been modified for more clarity and length.

I am not Mexican American, but I was deeply touched as a person who exists in the context of a diaspora. What was your intention behind this film mainly in Spanish?

At the start of this process, there was this aspiration to do something that had this pop culture, but post-colonial policy … Lots of pleasure and the goal of “sleep dealer” was to reverse preconceived ideas over the future. And one of them is the idea that the future is English and that the English -speaking world is the place where the future is under construction and writing. This is not true. We see it more every year now … The future will be multilingual. And so the idea of ​​making science fiction in Spanish was very exciting, to say that this language is not something of the past, but it is a component of the future.

Alex Rivera is a recipient of Genius Grant MacArthur examining the future of work and workers.

(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

In your film, people no longer do physical work, but they mechanically exploit much of what we see in the world. In “Sleep Dealers”, the main character, Memo Cruz, Use this robot remotely from Tijuana to build a building in San Diego. How do you think that an additional layer of technology in the “sleep concessionaire” illustrates the dehumanization of work migrating in today's economic workforce? The argument of liberals and conservatives around immigrant work is that we must legalize this group of people because they provide work to our country.

I start with the basic notion of the alienation of the work around us every day. The work that goes in the production of food we consume, the clothes we wear and the buildings in which we live – it is made invisible.

The idea of ​​a worker in another region, in another country, remotely controlling a machine that acts and does things here is an exaggeration or an increase in this basic dynamic around us. The technology systems that now connect the planet allow these extraordinarily extreme and increased forms of transmission and capture. There is always a ghost in the machine, whatever (if) a company wants to present its product as a transcendental object.

I want to approach the idea of ​​technology as a form of connection and disconnection. We see a memo trying to put the nodes in his skin so that he can be connected to this global economy. The installation of technology under our skin is not (yet) commonplace, but I see a lot of parallels between the way in which the memo experiences digital apartheid in its world and ours. Just as if you do not have the internet in your city, you are excluded from this world economy. There are ways whose technology can exacerbate existing inequalities.

Memo's family is from Oaxaca, where a huge company militarized a dam upstream. All natural resources are strongly kept due to the rarity induced by the climate. While you made this film, how did you think about climate change?

These ideas all come from a simple thesis: this capitalism is amoral and swallowed everything that is authorized to engulf. In this world, capitalism has unleashed, captured everything, even water and has packaged it to sell it to people with which it was taken. But then this kind of reflection was deployed and applied to things like our memories. Could our memories be bottled like water and sold? And our friendships? Our relationships, our time, etc. Therefore, this type of logic of capture, pregnant and commodification is the justification which links all the construction of the world of the “sleep dealer”.

We also see Rudy Ramirez, a fighter drone pilot, rebel against his guidelines. He is Mexican American, but he is also an arm of violence against the people who resemble him. How do you feel that, because we consider the limits of identity policy today?

I find that identity policy is largely the only way to give meaning to American history. You cannot really understand the United States, its past and its present, without looking at the way the breed has been structured and trained in this country and deployed to create friction and competition between the working class.

It is true that black and brown people are swept away in the imperial nucleus and become the executors of the regime which perpetuates their exclusion and their inequality. Rudy is represented as an agent of the Empire, but there is a flaw line in his being.

We see that in our own colored families, who join the police and the armed forces and are often sent to land that have suffered violence. The Latin-Latino family therefore uprooted because of the civil war supported by the United States and the CIA in Salvador, coming here, giving birth to a son or a daughter, who then joined the armed forces and is sent back to the world. These types of circles, we see them in our families. It is a rich and complicated reality, because identity is not abstract.

In the film, you have “Coyoteks”, a futuristic version of Coyotes who pass people through the border to become the migrant workers in the U.S. These coyoteks also facilitate work transfer by illegally setting up these nodes under their skin. Can you talk a little more about your inspiration?

(Melvin Kranzberg) said one day: “The technology is not good. The technology is not bad. It is not neutral either.”

Technology is a form or form that allows certain things and deactivates others, and there is room to navigate, but there are also constraints. It was the philosophy of the “sleep concessionaire”. These technologies, when they are released in capitalism, are immediately deployed to create forms of alienation, extraction and hyper-proportion hyper to create conditions in which companies and capitalists can move with ease and accelerate their work.

But these forces are not the only ones surrounding these technologies. Other pulses surround them: the impulse of not being alone, to hear the voice of a loved one, to connect with other people who share your identity group and your political points.

When I developed “Sleep Dealer”, I was very aware of the way Pentagon and companies used technology … But also how zapatistas used it, how the World Social Forum used it and how I used it every day in my life. Thus, the representation of technology in the film is supposed to be that of technology as a kind of battlefield with a powerful tendency to alienation and extraction.

But the story is not over. There is a space to hack, fight and create alternatives and remove these technologies from the capitalist cradle where they were born, to use them for other things.