michaelj108 Based on the premise of labor without laborers. The usual Mexican preoccupations with El Norte are there, but nicely balanced and understated. No preaching.It depicts a future only a few minutes away from today. Mexicans work in Mexico controlling via the internet robots in the USA that do everything from construction to nannies. They use Waldo's plugged into their nervous system. But there is no surfeit of tech-speak. A peon from the arid interior comes to Tijuana at the now completely closed USA border to work in one of the implant factories. He meets a writer who sells stories, memories. The drone operator who killed the peon's father seeks him out through the writer.Understated and visually dark, but arresting and unpredictable.

socrates99 Hollywood seems to have no use for a certain point of view, much to its own cultural diminution. Probably the single most repeated objective seen in the US history with Latin-America is its wish to garner the lion's share of the profits from its economic development. This is one of the very few movies to take the side of those being exploited and on that basis alone, I'd be happy to recommend it to any serious movie goer. But there's much more here than just that. There's real skill on display in its execution and conception. This is a low budget film, but its ability to say a great deal anyway, and especially through science fiction, is positively inspirational. Leonor Varela graces the screen like some impossibly dusky cinematic angel. And Luis Fernando Peña is also spot on.This film won some important awards, but, not surprisingly, I never heard of it until I was lucky enough to find it on my Blockbuster shelf. I'd love to see its director, Alex Rivera, continue on in this theme, but having heard about the small-mindedness of Hollywood, I can't help thinking this might be his only film.

valis1949 Alex Rivera's film, SLEEP DEALER, deftly examines and scrutinizes America's current obsession over the economic relationship with our neighbors to the South. Just over the Texas border, we watch as poor workers assemble at large industrial warehouses, and then are neurally interfaced with remote manipulators which allow them to perform much needed labor for America's industrial behemoth far to the north. As one of the characters in the film remarks, "We give the United States what they've always wanted, all the work-without the workers." The film is kind of a science fiction tale, but much of the technology is in use today. In the movie, American military operators remotely patrol and protect the US/Mexican border in far removed bases. Our present day 'War On Terror' employs this same technology as CIA agents in Langley, Virginia routinely operate remotely controlled drone jets to destroy individuals and targets in Afghanistan. One of the key themes of SLEEP DEALER is how these remote operators can be negatively impacted by their actions. SLEEP DEALER is a terrific 'first film' which ably tackles the themes of Power, Class, and The Distribution of Wealth in the emerging Global Economy of the 21st Century. Also, be sure to check out 'The Making Of' in the Bonus Features. You can see how the film evolved from simple drawings and story boards into the final product.

lastliberal Under a currently established World Bank system, credit or loans will not be issued to Third World countries and others unless they agree to allow foreign investors access to privatize their water supply. It required mass demonstrations in Bolivia to force out a subsidiary of Bechtel that had privatized the water supply, increased costs three-fold initially, dispensed with system upkeep, and left a quarter of the rural homes without access to water.So, the premise of this film starts with something real and not futuristic. Soldiers/mercenaries? guard the water and Mexican citizens must pay exorbitant rates for it.We then meet Memo (Luis Fernando Peña), a young man who hacks into the wrong system (like Matthew Broderick in War Games) and finds himself in big trouble.When he runs off to a border town, he finds a job with the Sleep Dealers; a world where migrant workers' nervous systems are plugged into a global network, allowing them to do menial jobs in the U.S. for low wages but without setting foot in the United States, and a girl (Leonor Varela).New director Alex Rivera creates a chilling scenario that is an indictment of global capitalism and a look at the lost promises of the Internet.Most sci-fi buffs will find the film excruciatingly slow, but it provides much room for though about exploitation and capitalism.