Alex Rivera
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“We Freed Ourselves from Conventional Documentary Ethics”: Directors Alex Rivera and Cristina Ibarra | The Infiltrators
Whenever directors watch their own films, they always do so with the knowledge that there are moments that occurred during their production — whether that’s in the financing and development or shooting or post — that required incredible ingenuity, skill, planning or just plain luck, but whose difficulty is invisible to most spectators. These are the moments directors are often the most proud of, and that pride comes with the knowledge that no one on the outside could ever properly appreciate what went into them. So, we ask: “What hidden part of your film are you most privately proud of […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 30, 2019 -
All the Work Without the Workers: Appreciating Sleep Dealer On Its Tenth Anniversary
Appraisal of the aesthetic and intellectual merits of science fiction, not to mention the sheer joy of encountering it, lately tends to be subsumed by talk of the perceived accuracy of a work and its predictions. We are living in the future allegedly imagined by William Gibson or Octavia Butler or Philip K. Dick, while films like Her and Gattaca serve as shopworn reference points in conversations about artificial intelligence and CRISPR. This veneration of the utilitarian function of science fiction at once demands too much from the work while denying its value apart from what might be gleaned from […]
by Joanne McNeil on Dec 20, 2018 -
Futurestates Launches Final Season with Seven Films and One Immersive Storyworld
Launching today is the fifth and final season of ITVS’s online series, Futurestates — short films by independent filmmakers “exploring the visions and various challenges of what life might look like in an America of the not so distant future, where automation and artificial intelligence is becoming an even more dominant force in people’s day to day lives.” The series has a different form this year, with the seven shorts all part of one immersive storyworld that is expressed not just through the films but through social media and a striking website by New York interactive specialists Murmur. Comments series […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 14, 2014 -
“SLEEP DEALER” co-writer-director, Alex Rivera
Rasquachismo. Sleep Dealer is a science fiction set in Mexico. In the script I described everything from exploding buildings and fighter-jet dogfights to remote-control robots. The effects were never the focus of the film — they existed to give a politicized futuristic setting for my characters. When time came to actually produce the insanely challenging visuals, my amazing d.p. and VFX supervisor and I solved many, many problems with rasquachismo. Rasquachismo refers to a spirit in Latino communities of taking what’s at hand, cobbling it together, and making something wondrous out of it. Like using parts of one old car […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 14, 2008
