International Documentary magazine wrote that Alex Rivera “may represent the best hope of the contemporary cinema”; he was named one of “20 to Watch” by Filmmaker magazine; and he was profiled in a book about the future of Latino media. He was also the subject of a memorable caption from a 2003 article in The New York Times about an Iraq War protest: “Alex Rivera, camera in hand, was tackled by police officers yesterday near Rockefeller Center and taken away.”

Rivera is someone to watch and, sometimes, someone to watch out for. The ambitious vision of his first feature Sleep Dealer, screening in the Dramatic Competition, indicates that Rivera likes to flirt with the aesthetic danger inherent in genre-hopping. Sleep Dealer is full of “wild ideas,” as Rivera puts it. It’s accurate to say that the movie, set in the near future, is science fiction, but it’s about immigration and the disparity of wealth between the northern parts of the globe and the poorer south. And it’s set largely in Mexico, not a common arena for science fiction films.

The 34-year-old Rivera has been making documentaries about immigration for the past 15 years. Papapapá, the 30-minute video he made while still in college in 1995, is a playful interweaving of both his Peruvian father’s immigration to the United States and another immigrant: the Peruvian potato. Despite being screened by the Museum of Modern Art, Rivera’s father thought of Papapapá as “his worst nightmare,” Rivera recalled. “He came to the U.S. to struggle to get me into college and what it all leads to is [my] making a documentary about him,” Rivera said. “I think he was thinking more of a doctor or lawyer scenario.” The Sixth Section, Rivera’s documentary about a group of immigrants in Newburgh, New York who band together to fund a baseball stadium in their small Mexican hometown, was aired by P.O.V. in 2003.

With Sleep Dealer, Rivera has taken his work on immigration one imaginative step further. The protagonist, Memo Cruz (Luis Fernando Peña), stifled in the remote Oaxacan village where he grew up, migrates to Tijuana to become a node worker, someone whose body is hooked up to a bunch of cables. As Memo moves his hands to the right, a machine on top of a construction site in the United States also moves to the right. It’s a telling commentary on the current immigration debate: The U.S. needs the labor that Latino immigrants perform, but we ask those immigrants to remain invisible. Sleep Dealer slightly exaggerates that hypocrisy by asking the viewer to visualize a policy dictating workers who literally work in the U.S. but never set foot here. “This isn’t a crazy Martian movie,” Rivera pointed out, “I’m taking today’s reality and pushing it a few moments into the future.”

In the process, Rivera comments on globalization, outsourcing, and immigration simultaneously. “In science fiction, I can tie together all those issues that are kept separate in the news,” Rivera said. “The idea was not to make a message film but a sort of Rorschach test. I wanted to make something that’s a delight to watch, and once you’re there, what you get is not a simple message but a reflection of realities that we know.”