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.

The Film: Joel O. Shapiro's 2005 film The Visionary
The Scientist: The 17 minute film explores the more Fellini-esque side of scientists Nikola Tesla, starting with him no-showing his acceptance of the Edison Prize in 1917.
What's Missing? The Visionary makes no attempt to be comprehensive, but a few more references to Tesla's extraordinary biography for those wanting to know more couldn't have hurt. The film focuses primarily on Tesla's tower, necessarily omitting for time much of his entertaining early life.
Verdict: If you're curious, sample the gorgeous cinematography of the film here. The Prestige will have to do for now.

The Film: The animated short Paprika, not to be confused with the 2006 feature length Japanese anime of the same name.
The Scientist: Albert Szent-Györgyi, who extracted Vitamin C from paprika in the early part of the twentieth century. He also saved Jews during World War II, so despite the cute animation, there's a big time story here.
What's Missing? To watch Paprika you'd think Szent-Györgyi was a paprika farmer in Hungary who happened to make a discovery. In reality he was a Cambridge grad with a long history of important science. But that's not the point in this child-oriented cartoon.
Verdict: Paprika is a fun YouTube, if a bit light on science. You can watch it in its entirety here.

The Film: Jim Berry and Fritz Michel's hospital short Semmelweis
The Scientist: Ignaz Semmelweis was a doctor whose genius idea that doctors should wash their hands is roundly frowned upon by a generation of obsessive-compulsives. A law school dropout, he found he could make an impact in early medicine.
What's Missing? Set in a Vienna hospital (right), the filmmakers even made a trip to get a few evocative exteriors. Still, Semmelweis's epilogue reveals that Semmelweis was beaten to death by guards in a lunatic asylum, a scene you never omit from a screenplay.
Verdict: Some of the production values scream "We shot this in Yonkers," but hey, they did shoot it in Yonkers. A fun and entertaining, if amateurish, look at nineteenth century science.

The Film: experimental documentary Great Stupidity and Profound Genius from director Benita Raphan, who last worked on a highly regarded Buckminster Fuller documentary.
The Scientists: The film profiles Helen Keller, Paul Erdos (right), and other great geniuses in a unique free flow of sound and image.
What's Missing? With echoes of Hollis Frampton's Zorn's Lemma, the film doesn't really make a convincing argument for how "stupidity" relates to genius, but it gets points for challenging Jesus' IQ and its compelling abstract visuals. The highlight is undoubtedly a ten year prodigy's explanation of how he solves complicated equations.
Verdict: It doesn't get less marketable than a short documentary, but Benita Raphan's fascinating tribute airs on The Sundance Channel from time to time. She's a promising young talent in the field, and you have to eagerly anticipate her next project.