Imagine crossing the border without ever leaving home. Your body stays behind while your labor, your nervous system, your hands, get sold to a factory a thousand miles away.

That is the premise of SLEEP DEALER (2008), directed by Alex Rivera from a script he wrote with David Riker. In a militarized near future, the border is sealed with walls and drones, so Mexican workers plug their nerves into a network and operate robots that build American buildings and pick American crops, all without setting foot in the country.

Luis Fernando Peña plays Memo Cruz, a young man from Oaxaca whose home is destroyed by a drone strike ordered by a remote pilot named Rudy Ramirez, played by Jacob Vargas. Memo moves to Tijuana, gets the nodes implanted in his body, and goes to work in a "sleep dealer" factory. Leonor Varela plays Luz, a writer who sells her memories online, and whose connection to Memo pulls Rudy into their orbit as well.

Rivera made the film for a fraction of a typical science fiction budget, using its low-tech aesthetic to sharpen its argument rather than hide its limits. It imagines globalization taken to its logical end: labor without migration, connection without contact, and bodies reduced to bandwidth.