Preview: Sleep Dealers

"Why not do science fiction? What anyone can write, none of it comes close to how we lived in the Caribbean." I'm sitting across from Junot Diaz, talking to him about his new novel in a cafe near Union Square. For a long time, I've heard from him that he's doing a science fiction novel. Which he says he'll work on when he spends his post-promotion time in Rome, on a fellowship.

So the idea of science fiction as a mode that needs to be reclaimed, colorized, has been floating around a while. My dear friend Elliott last year gave me a cool Orson Scott Card novel, Pastwatch, which attempts to undo the Columbian (as in the fukú-bringer) disaster. And another friend says he's been hearing the same thing from writers he knows. It's a moment, I think.

Which brings me to Alex Rivera's "The Sleep Dealer," a near-future story about the border, terrorism and virtual connectedness. As the main character, Memo, says, "vivimos en un mundo dividido, pero conectado" (we live in a world that's divided, but connected).

The movie has been years in the making. I remember when it was just a wee trailer. And I was privileged enough to be invited to see a fine cut.

The story has familiar outlines: a boy stuck in a rural Mexican community, where resources are scarce, dreams of more, of away. He tries to tap into the networks of information that connect him elsewhere. But his actions unwittingly bring disaster to the family. So he moves to the city, where he finds charactes who may or may not be his friends, soul-killing work and faint pleasures. He eventually has to come to terms with his past and with whether he can insert himself into a movement to resist hegemonization, the Man, whatever name you choose.

Now here are the differences from our world. Water is held hostage by corporations. "Water terrorists" (who look suspiciously like indigenous protesters from El Sur) try to reclaim what's rightfully theirs. The U.S.-Mexico border is shut down. Tijuana looks the same. No matter. Mexican workers no longer have to cross, they just pay "coyoteks" to jack them in as "node workers" and sit in an "info-maquila" manipulating robots on the U.S. side. But node workers aren't just a substitute for manual labor. Knowledge workers, like the writer Luz, and soldiers like Rudy Gaeta, also work through nodes, selling memories/stories and controlling drone attackers from their terminals.

I remembered Children of Men, Brother from Another Planet and the grand-daddy of sci-fi race movies, Blade Runner (though some might argue that a whole lot of science fiction can be seen as being "about" race.)

Alex was very apologetic about the roughness of what we saw -- missing FX, missing dialogue, uneven color and different stocks -- but generally speaking, and I said this to him, it works. It totally works. Rooted in the Mexican landscape, referencing trends like the browning of the military, the coming water wars, the revealing of personal essence that has become the stock in trade of blogs, never mind the debate over immigration or definitions of "terrorism."

If this isn't the perfect time for a movie like this, I don't know what is.

Check the movie website here (warning: the actors in the pseudo-trailer are not the ones in the movie), and Alex's other great work here. And watch for it at a festival near you.

[images via sleepdealer.com]