CIUDAD SIN SUEÑO

Spain, France

Fiction

Toni, a 15-year-old Roma boy, lives in Europe's largest illegal settlement, on Madrid’s outskirts. Proud to belong to his family of scrap dealers, he follows his grandfather everywhere. But demolitions edge closer to their plot, and his grandfather refuses to leave, no matter what sacrifice. On dark nights without electricity, when the legends of his childhood come alive, Toni must choose: either to face an uncertain future or hold on to a vanishing world.

Directed by: Guillermo Galoe
Written by: Guillermo Galoe, Victor Alonso-Berbel
Produced by: Marina García López, Marisa Fernádez Armenteros, Manuel Calvo, Alex Lafuente, Justin Pechberty, Anne Dominique Toussaint
Cinematography: Rui Poças
Editing: Victoria Lammers
Production Design: Ana Mallo
Costume Design: Iratxe Sanz
Make-Up & Hair: Marta García
Sound: Barto Alcaine, Antoine Bertucci, Vincent Arnardi
Visual Effects: Justine Juarez Bellais
Casting: Elena Saura
Cast: Toni Fernández Gabarre (Toni), Bilal Sedraoui (Bilal), Jesús Fernández Silva (Chule), Francisca Jiménez Fernández (Paqui)

Statement of the director:
When I got to know La Cañada Real up close in 2015, I was shooting my documentary DELICATE BALANCE and observed how globalisation displaces human beings and affects lives on an intimate level in different places around the world. I found a place right next to my house that was completely displaced, outside of the world, outside of time. It deeply moved me, and intuitively, I knew that my next film was going to be made there, but I also knew it would take time: it’s a place where trust has been undermined by all the stigmatising and paternalistic images and representations that have been made of it, and because specifically in sector 6, where there is a large market for cocaine and heroin, it is very difficult for an outsider to gain trust.
From a cinematic perspective, on the one hand, I found a context in line with my previous works that motivates me to film: a Tower of Babel, a borderland, a liminal space, outside the mainstream, where reality responds to its own laws and logic and offers a mystery that interests me for the cinema I want to make. In this context, between the urban and the rural, between the natural and the magical, I was interested in how children’s perspectives can offer images very different from the images we have all seen of La Cañada and similar places. I felt that cinema with a poetic gaze could create a representation and an imaginary of that place that no other medium can achieve. Therefore, on an aesthetic and political level, I believe that cinema can do what society does not do with La Cañada: to approach, to embrace.
On the other hand, as a filmmaker, I am interested in delving into feelings and life, especially in characters hardened by the contradictions of existence who still radiate light and spirit. In La Cañada, I have found a lot of vitality, a lot of light, even though families have been living in darkness, without electricity, for three years. There, I found much pain, but also a strong desire to live. Behind the hardness of many faces, there is a fragility that deeply moves me.
It is in this intimacy where SLEEPLESS CITY is located. Where, once again, cinema can bring us closer to people who are far away or very displaced, this time through what makes us all equal: our feelings, our intimacy. And this is political as well.
In SLEEPLESS CITY the socio-political complexities that permeate La Cañada Real, many of which are the challenges faced by the Fourth World in the West, are present in the film but are not the main focus. They do cause the disintegration of Toni’s family and the rupture of the strong father-son bond between Toni and his grandfather (who is the true father figure in these families with almost adolescent parents), and with it, the inevitable break with his roots. They also lead the characters to confront the loss of a world that is ending, in an atmosphere almost like a twilight western (indeed, La Cañada has much of the Far West in it); they face the loss of Toni’s best friend and, with it, a way of seeing the world: that of childhood. Toni, who was almost born as an adult out of necessity, resists losing that perspective, and the film wants, along with him, to keep it alive. These emotions are the main focus of the film.
The tone of the film is one of poetic realism, guided by Toni’s perspective, who still possesses the magic of wonder. The everyday events of La Cañada, a place where things and people appear and disappear without apparent explanation, will be veiled by the halo of childhood mystery. Everything that appears in the film emerges purely from the reality of La Cañada, but it is the unusual nature of it and, above all, the way of looking at it, that makes it magical. I like how filmmakers like Victor Erice or Carlos Saura have reflected on this way of seeing. In Italian neorealism, I also find distant references, and, more closely, in the cinema of Alice Rohrwacher.
In this atmosphere, Toni, with his friend Bilal’s mobile phone, also captures his images of La Cañada. These images evolve with him in the film: Toni uses video filters on the phone to colour the reality that surrounds him. These mobile phone images, and the phone itself as an object, are directly related to the emotional heart of the film: they are what connects Toni to his best friend and to the world he is losing. The colour filters are inspired by the legends that Toni hears from his grandmother, based on tales and legends that I have heard in La Cañada. Legends that speak of the future, something completely uncertain in the short and long term there, and that speak of the cyclical continuity of the situation: relocations are a solution that only perpetuates marginalisation, moving people from one ghetto to another, subject to the real estate and economic interests of the moment.
SLEEPLESS CITY is a document, an evocation of a place that is going to disappear, and also of a personal relationship, built over years, with a community to which I have a deep bond.

Production:
Sintagma Films
https://www.sintagmafilms.com

World Sales:
Best Friend Forever
https://bestfriendforever.be

Press/Social Media Agency:
Mad Avenue
https://www.madavenue.es