Just so you don't think I'm all religion all the time, let me tell you about a film I saw this afternoon at MoMA in their new directors series: Alex Rivera's "Sleep Dealer." (He's just found a distributor, so it might be showing near you soonish.) It's a science fiction film which takes place in Mexico in the not too distant future. Like all good science fiction, its conceits are etnirely believable; Rivera said a number of elements in the film came close to coming true over the 10 years it took to make it!In the world of the film the border between the US and Mexico has been closed, and the "American dream" has been realized: cheap foreign labor without the laborers. Instead, Mexicans get electric nodes implanted in their arms and neck (with the help of shady types called coyoteks), and through bright blue cables are connected to robot workers in el Norte (construction workers, orange pickers, nannies) they operate remotely. The same technology is used from the US, too, as security companies (we see one in San Diego) remotely operate drones who identify "terrorists" resisting American companies' monopolization of resources like water throughout the world - and kill them. The story starts as a Mexican American drone operator's first "mission" - televised and seen around the world in a show like "Cops" - destroys the house in rural Oaxaca where protagonist Memo lives.
The film is beautifully made and full of wisdom and wit, but somehow the whole is less than the sum of its parts. Or maybe it's that the sum of its parts is so close to where we are that one turns away in affront...
