Independents Day: Alex Rivera

"I think of it as a new branch of science fiction," says filmmaker Alex Rivera of his brilliant and bizarre-ass first film, Sleep Dealer. "In science fiction literature, you see writers that are thinking about the whole world -- in science fiction cinema, though, it's the only branch of cinema that doesn't have a world component." And with that, I feel like I know nothing about movies -- as if I'm learning about film for the very first time. That's the kind of vibe you get from Rivera, 35, and his decidedly prescient film, which premiered to raucous love at Sundance last year and is set for a theatrical release next month.

Rivera came upon the title of the film, Sleep Dealer, in a book by art historian and theorist John Berger -- the term refers to early 20th-century migrant workers who walked from southern Europe to northern Europe for jobs, forced to rent beds along the way from "sleep dealers." The film, however, is set in a futuristic world where Mexican villagers are forced to buy water from an English-only-speaking robot, and the only available employment is in Tijuana cyberfactories.

Rivera, who was lucky enough to hook up with producer Anthony Bregman (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) through the Sundance Institute, where he went through both the Writers' Lab and the Directors' Lab, is absolutely affable and smart, appealing in his genuinely curious nature. Even though Bregman came on board as a producer for Sleep Dealer early on, Rivera was never quite convinced the film would get made ("I still don't believe it will ever make it to theaters.") and was inclined to manage his expectations with judicious humor.

"I started to conceive of [the film] as a provocation, as an attack, as a kind of joke, really, saying, 'What would it be like if this genre that is the terrain of Harrison Ford and Tom Cruise was flipped completely upside down, and instead of making Tom Cruise the hero, we made that guy in the background of Blade Runner -- the guy riding a bicycle and speaking, you know, Spanglish -- what if we made that person the protagonist?'" I'll tell you what would happen: A stellar moment in independent filmmaking.

Styling by Zandile Blay

Hair by Dominick Pucciarello for Bryan Bantry Inc.

Shirt and pants by Converse By John Varvatos.

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