Friday is the hometown premiere of Alex Rivera's Sleep Dealer, at New Directors/New Films. If you recall from my pre-Sundance preview a few months back, the movie is a "rascuache sci-fi" border dystopia about plug-in maquilas, aqua-terrorism and robot soldiers.
Aside from winning two prizes at Sundance -- the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award and the Alfred P. Sloan Prize (for film on science/technology) -- the movie's been getting highlighted in just about every local article on New Films/New Directors.
Today, Tony Scott at the NYT says the film is "exhuberantly entertaining" and calls Alex, ahem, "brilliant." And indieWIRE's Steve Ramos wrote after the Sundance screening that the movie is a "nervy combination of social politics with future shock storytelling." Some of the earlier reviews (see, for example, Variety's) faulted some story glitches and the less-than-million-dollar effects, but I'm hoping for a happy medium (at the stage I saw the movie, there were some story holes Alex promised to work on).
This week's NY Mag has Sleep Dealer as one of four films it highlighted in a pull-out graphic-plus-blurb feature. Note that three of the films NY Mag chose here are Latin@merican, without the usual "New Latin Cinema" label.
But for an oft-repeated yet worth repeating plaint about how Hollywood keeps having Latin American/Spanish-speaking stand in for Latino (why Spanish Javier Bardem and Mexican Gael Garcia Bernal are the hottest "Latino" actors and three Mexican "amigos" are the hottest "Latino" directors), check Jim Mendiola's post about La Misma Luna, which apparently broke Spanish-language three-day weekend box office records with a $2.8M take.
As for Sleep Dealer, I'll be watching it Friday night, and will report back on the finished version. I think tickets are still available, if not for Friday, then for the Saturday 5:30 pm MoMA screening. You can check here.
[Tijuana sky picture from "Sleep Dealer" shoot via Mark Russell's blog; "Sleep Dealer" still via NHK]
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