Guide Note:

Alex Rivera is a film director and media artist whose film, Sleep Dealer, won two awards at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival.

Fast Facts:

1. Born: 1973, in New York City
2. Received Rockefeller Fellowship and Sundance Fellowship
3. Work concerned with globalization involving immigration and globalization involving information technology
4. Sleep Dealer won Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize and the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award

Brief Biography

Rivera was born in the New York City area in 1973 to parents of mixed national backgrounds: his father is Peruvian, but his mother is Irish-American. Rivera began making films while a student at Hampshire College in Massachusetts, and only rediscovered his Latino heritage after he began making art. His film Sleep Dealer is a science fiction film inspired by Blade Runner, but which traces the journey of a young farm worker from his destroyed home in rural Mexico to a futuristic Tijuana, where the Mexican laborer of the future is prevented from entering the United States. Instead of actually working in the United States, the laborers in Sleep Dealer must painfully implant "nodes" into their body which, when hooked up to fiber optic wires, allow them to control robots at construction sites and industrial farms across the walled-off United States.