Sleep Dealer will be arriving in theaters April 17 in select cities, and you should definitely check out this tripped-out film about importing labor (but not people) from South of the Border.

[IGN]

We are all big fans of Alex Rivera's Sleep Dealer, and we urge you to seek out this movie about the possible future of North America. In Rivera's dark future, all of the manual labor jobs are controlled by people south of the border (who are blocked from US access by a fence). Which means all the labor, but none of the people. It's a stunningly beautiful movie, with a tiny budget and big ideas. Follow the main character, Memo, as he moves to the big city looking for telecommuting "node" work, and in turn finds himself face-to-face with the people across the giant fence.

To see the poster, gigantor sized, click on the thumbnail below. The film comes out April 17 in select cities.

Sleep Dealer is the story of Memo, a young Mexican from Oaxaca who travels to Tijuana to become the new kind of migrant worker — one who stays in Mexico but exports his labor to the United States, via cybernetic implants. He meets Luz, a young journalist who sells her actual memories online via her own cybernetic implants, and she installs "nodes" on his body in a very Cronenberg-esque scene. A third character in the movie is Rudy, the cyber-pilot of a drone plane, who destroys Memo's home and kills Memo's father after Memo mistakenly hacks into some military transmissions.

The scene where Memo first connects to the telepresence network and his consciousness is suddenly inside a robot worker on a construction site in the United States is really breathtaking. You get a sense of how weird it must be to move your arms and legs and have a robot's limbs respond. Memo makes the mistake of looking down and realizes he's hundreds of feet above the ground — or, rather, his robot body is.

Rivera explained that the original inspiration for Sleep Dealer came from a film in the Prelinger Archive called Why Braceros? A 1959 industrial film created by the U.S. government, Braceros explains the need for Mexican immigrant workers on American farms. Here's a clip:

Rivera saw that film a dozen years ago, and it inspired him to start thinking about questions of borders and technology — a big point in the original documentary is that farm technology has allowed many tasks to be automated, but some jobs still require "stoop labor."

So Rivera made a fake documentary of his own, 1997's Why Cybraceros?, which features a satirical look at the idea of Mexican labor telecommuting over the border via cyber implants. It includes funny images of cartoon Mexican robots floating through the trees, and Mexican workers' arms getting taken off so the arms can cross the border, leaving the armless Mexicans behind. It's pretty hilarious, with the fake chart with a bar showing "American labor force sophistication" and a downward line showing "available farm labor." And Mexican workers controlling robots using a Commodore 64 and an Atari joystick. It's "as simple as point and click, to pick."

Rivera even put up a fake Cybracero website, which explains the program in detail.

"The rhetoric of that industrial film was very trippy, in terms of the abstract nature of labor," says Rivera, so he wanted to play with the idea of disconnecting labor from people. In 1997, when he made his short film, everyone was obsessed with the idea of the "global village" and borders coming down, but the U.S. was also building a wall along its border with Mexico and there was a new anti-immigrant movement.

He's been working on Sleep Dealer since then, and it's taken over a decade to complete. He finally got financing in 2005 and shot it in 2006. The film showed at Sundance, to enthusiastic reviews, and you can read our own review here.

Rivera also showed a couple other short films: a ten-minute set of documentaries about the border between the U.S. and Mexico, made as part of the PBS online series Borders, and a bizarre Independence Day-esque short about the U.S. being invaded by giant flying sombreros with chili pepper rayguns. The Borders films explore the idea of borders being closed to humans, but open to imports and services.

The hard part of making Sleep Dealer, for Rivera, was turning his big-picture economic story into a more personal story of two people and their relationship. "I like to think about systems, economics, the big picture, millions of pepope. To think about two people... was a real struggle for me." And these questions of the future of labor and immigration are really difficult to talk about, so "I wanted to see if science fiction was a genre where we could have this conversation."

When Memo first logs into the telepresence network, you can see a huge list of languages that he chooses Spanish from. The idea, says Rivera, was to show that you could hire telepresence workers from Indonesia or China or wherever — whoever is cheapest. It's a "race to the bottom enabled by the network." Sometimes the workers get blinded by a power surge, but it's an acceptable loss.

My friend who went to the event with me had one question about the future world of Sleep Dealer: is it ever really going to get cheaper to use robots to replace individual human workers? After all, robots have already replaced workers in a factory setting, but that's usually one robot doing the work of twenty humans. Here, you have one robot doing the work of one person. Is that ever going to be cost-effective? Rivera says yes, and he actually thinks this is a possible future economic model:

Have you seen those videos of the Honda robots that can dance and play soccer and walk up and down stairs? We're in a place where robots can do, physically, most of what we can do. They can dance better than I do... but they can't make any judgements. Artifiical intelligence is not anywhere near where the robot [can think for itself]. The robot mind is like a grasshopper mind. [So I foresee a] future where the mechanical part of the robot is very sophisticated and cheap, but it needs a spirit, somebody to make a judgement, someone to communicate. [And that portion] is outsourced. I think that's actually a business model. Not today, but in a few years. i have a feeling that's potentially a reality. We are seeing that ambivalence, where that mechanical is very sophisticated, but the artifiical intelligence is retarded.

Already, you have the weird juxtaposition of high technology and squalor, where ipods and other shiny gadgets are made by people who live in shantytowns, says Rivera. "It's a scifi nightmare more vivid than Mad Max."

Rivera is working on two new projects right now. One is a true story based on an article in Wired magazine. The other is a science fiction film that starts in the Andes in a gold mine, with the last remaining gold seams. The gold mine will turn out to be connected to nanotechnology, because the best nanotech often uses gold fibers "because gold is such a good conductive metal."

Sleep Dealer is being released in theaters in the U.S. in March 2009.

Shown to a small group of Pratt students and one very old woman who couldn't read subtitles, it was an inauspicious beginning of one of the best small budget science fiction films we are likely to see in some time.

Our hero is Memo (Luis Fernando Peña), a small-time hacker in futuristic Mexico who gets caught up in some very bad shit. Mexico is a waterless wasteland in writer-director's imagining, and Memo wants to go to Tijuana and become a "sleep dealer", an immigrant pulled in by nodes to larger system where the U.S. can enjoy "work without the workers," as the script artfully puts it. 21st century technology sucks the life force into the U.S., without much regard for the consequences.

When he gets to Tijuana, Memo meets the gorgeous Luz (Leonor Varela) on a bus. She tells him that she's a writer, and they part ways. Luz's writing consists of a voiceover of her own experience recorded in TruNode, a memory marketplace where she earns a living. While her other memories don't sell very well, her time with Memo finds a buyer, who asks her to go back to find him. Broke, she agrees, and turns Memo into one of them by installing electronic metal nodes into his wrists and neck.

The third participant in this drama is the person buying Memo's memories, but that's for you to know when Sleep Dealer arrives in a theater near you. It's difficult for a film to grab you with the same futuristic trappings these days, but the closest Rivera's Spanish language fantasy ever gets to America is the robot Memo controls remotely on a construction site in San Diego. This gives the $2 million dolllar film a freshness that most more expensively budgeted movies lack.

A lower budget can often be reflected in the caliber of actor the film attracts, but there's no such problem here. While Memo isn't given much to do — he's mostly an observer until the end of the film — he's a nice proxy for the viewer, crossing the border, meeting the new. The rest of the performances are similar understated. The real star is Rivera' constantly shifting point of view: he's a talented cinematographer, and Sleep Dealer manages plenty of unforgettable images. Node junkies writhe in seedy bars, turret cannons swivel and recede, farmers watch high definition television with cornstalks in the background. This is a world we're not familiar with.

This kind of story does the opposite of most science fiction, taking up the viewpoint of an outsider innocent of advanced technology. Memo's first appearance in the film is in front of a stack of books that says Hackers for Beginners. It's a funny joke, but the critique rings true: too often writers are focused on the ways developing technologies affect the most wealthy, or the most powerful. Sleep Dealer's message for America is a knowing, if overstated one, and yet its hero Memo still yearns for the technology, and the power that goes with it. Without that, he's helpless.

People have been going absolutely bonkers over this Mexican scifi film, including rave reviews from Sundance. And I think I see why from the trailer — not only is this film beautiful, but after just a few moments of exposure, I'm already curious to find out more about Alex Rivera's characters. Especially the young man who hacks his way into the people/computer system. Rumor is that this film will be released on a much grander scale in February of 2009. [Slashfilm and Sleep Dealer]

In Sleep Dealer, the U.S. has finally succeeded in stopping illegal immigrants crossing over from Mexico. But Mexicans can still work in American factories and farms for almost no money, thanks to the miracle of telecommuting. The people in Alex Rivera's film hook up their nervous systems to the Internet to control robots in the U.S., but it takes a toll on them, as you can see from the spooky clip and stills above. The film's title refers to workers who get so drained they collapse.

Rivera says this bizarre scenario may be what America wants: "to use the labor, but not have the person."

Here's the official synopsis for this Sundance-bound film:

The story begins with Memo Cruz, a young campesino, or peasant farmer, in southern Mexico. He's always dreamed of leaving his small pueblo and maybe finding work in the big cities in the north. His dream comes true in the worst possible way when his home is mistakenly identified as a terrorist hideout in a hilariously reckless "Global War on Terror."

Rudy Gaeta is a soldier fighting in this future war. He works for an American security company flying a remote control war machine — a pumped-up version of today's Predator Drone. Rudy's first assignment is to take out the "terrorists" in southern Mexico. Following orders, from his office in sunny San Diego, Rudy dispatches a drone and attacks Memo's home in Mexico.

Uprooted as a consequence of the attack, Memo has to leave the pueblo and go north to earn money to help his family start again. He heads to the massive border city of Tijuana.

On his way into Tijuana Memo meets a young woman named Luz. Luz is a writer, and going into the city to look for stories. After she meets Memo we see what "writing" means in this future. Alone in her room, Luz connects her body to the net and speaks. As she describes her day, the computer records visuals from her memories and the sound of her voice. She puts these recorded memories up for sale on the net - a blog, straight from the brain.

In Tijuana, Memo finds work in a futuristic factory - he earns dollars by connecting his body to the net, and controlling a worker drone in America.

At home in San Diego, Rudy, the soldier, is lonely and disconnected from the world. He spends his free time plugging in and watching recordings of other people's memories. A few days after he attacked Memo's home, Rudy has doubts - something about the attack didn't feel right. He searches for information on the net, and finds Luz's story. He buys it, and for the first time, through Luz's recorded memories, he sees Memo's face - the face of his victim.

Through Luz's stories, effectively through her eyes and ears, Rudy gets to know Memo. And as Luz and Memo fall in love, Rudy realizes what he's done.