In person: Alex Rivera

In Sleep Dealer, director Alex Rivera imagines a future in which workers and their labor are separated by technology. His film follows a Mexican “node” factory worker named Memo Cruz (Luis Fernando Peña) in a militarized Tijuana. Using headwear that muzzles his mouth and wires connected to ports in his arms, Memo controls robots across the US border in a dystopian vision of migrant labor. Rivera and production designer Miguel Ángel Álvarez created props crafted with store-bought materials to represent high-tech devices. The film’s future world maintains a realistic lo-fi aesthetic, suggesting this dystopian future is imaginable from the present.