Sleep Dealer | Cyberpunk: Envisioning Possible Futures Through Cinema
Join the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures for a film series featuring cyberpunk films like The Matrix, Ex Machina, Blade Runner and more! These films accompany the museum’s PST ART: Art & Science Collide exhibition Cyberpunk: Envisioning Possible Futures Through Cinema. Cyberpunk, a subgenre of science fiction, first appeared in the early 1980s and uniquely captured the anxieties of that decade. Featuring near-future scenarios set in worlds that resemble our own, cyberpunk stories juxtapose technological advances with social upheaval, ecological crisis, and urban decay.
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.
