10 · 09 · 08

Rivera presents Sleep Dealer, award winner at Sundance.

Doris Morales/Translated by Caroline MacKinnon

[imagen]Born in New York, Alex Rivera is not only a director but a digital media artist. His first film Sleep Dealer (U.S.-Mexico, 2008), was screened at Sundance, where it won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award. It also won the Amnesty International Film Prize at the 2008 Berlinale.  

Invited as part of the juried Documentary Section, Alex Rivera presented Sleep Dealer at the Cinépolis Centro, calling it a product of an “odd” cinematic tradition of animation, experimental film and documentary. The film also engages with the science fiction genre, with its plot of a young man and his family attacked in Oaxaca by a type of missile launched from the United States.   

Rivera added that his interest in the plot sprung from a recognition that this genre of film is never set in Mexico, existing only in New York, Los Angeles, and London. He was also interested in exploring the character of a young man from an immigrant family.

Youth call for worldwide screening of Sleep Dealer

Sleep Dealer also screened Friday to a friendly audience at the Cine Colonial. The packed house of mostly young people gave the film great reviews and were in favor of its screening worldwide, for the astute vision it offers of how a future under total U.S. domination could change this country. 

Alex Rivera, notably pleased with the public response, thanked the audience for coming and in conclusion asked that they “consider radical acts in order to attain the kind of world that we want in the future.”