Sleep Dealer is a 2008 futuristic science fiction film directed by Alex Rivera. Sleep Dealer depicts a dystopian future to explore ways in which technology both oppresses and connects migrants. A fortified wall has ended illegal US-Mexico immigration, but migrant workers are replaced by robots, remotely controlled by the same class of would-be emigrants. Their life force is inevitably used up, and they are discarded without medical compensation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_Dealer
An interview with Alex Rivera in the online magazine Crossed Genres is here:
http://crossedgenres.com/archives/024-charactersofcolor/interview-alex-rivera/
Rivera's description (from the interview) of how he got to be interested in these themes is here:
I grew up in up-state New York in a house that was connected, primarily by technology, to Latin America. The connection that I had through my father to Peru was mediated largely by the television, the telephone, and home videos which were exchanged. I knew that I had Peruvian blood and Peruvian family, but my experience of that other place was very mediated.
One of his first films is more experimental in nature..a short (around 20 minutes) called PapaPapá
http://www.invisibleamerica.com/qt-150-papapapa.html
In class one of the things we talked about was how visceral it felt (and painful) to see the connections (or nodes) that were placed in the bodies of the workers. I talked a little about cybernetics, and the idea of the awkward interface between the human body and machine.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics
For a feminist take on cybernetics, read Donna Haraway's
A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century
http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/irvinem/theory/Haraway-CyborgManifesto.html
-ss
