As of 2010, illegal immigration has become and remains a major hot button issue. The collapse of the American economy has ensured what has always been overlooked, that the steady flux of immigrants into the country has got to have more and more beaucratic red tape. It would be one thing if the system worked, but somewhere down the line, Congress has made it there business to look the other way, for reasons that simply point to greasing their palms with the likes of lobbyists and big business. They make for bad bedfellows, always has, and always will. Science Fiction films have always been a lens into the underlying psyche of what society knows and yet cannot directly express, so taking it in the metaphoric realm of telling a fictional tale, is always a great way of getting the point across. I aliken it to something like Flintstone vitamins or cherry-flavored NyQuil of the mind. But whatever.
Most of these stories have been told from the somewhat askewed perspective of caucasian filmmakers getting their points across. Not that there's anything wrong with that if they're good at it, because usually they're underdogs who have to fight just to say what they deem is righteous as well. Often times to their own punishments. It is however a rare occassion when you get that lens of social commentary from someone who's very familiar and in the thick of the subject matter. Case in point, with Documentarian Alex Rivera who has taken the sci-fi storytelling to show what the world is experiencing right now, and not really doing it with kid gloves.
Rivera's debut film, "Sleep Dealer", follows Memo Cruz; a farmboy of sorts who lives a rural life with his family in Santa Ana Del Rio in Oaxaca, Mexico. We learn fairly quickly the near future, is no utopia, as all the predictions of the past about big business and government merging into one is also evident here. In this film's world "They" control the water and have it dammed up and protected by electric fences equipped with cash deposit machines and heavily-armed cameras. Memo also has a hobby as a hacker, who goes into some sort of social networking sites via radio waves. As he dreams of migrating into a better life by way of getting "nodes" (more on this later) like some of the conversations he hears, he also has to evade military drones that fly overhead and destroy anything they deem suspicious activity. Unfortunately one day, they do pick up his signal, and while he and his brother are away from home, the drones return to the farm and destroy it; killing his father.
