Sleepless City

Bluesky

When movie people label the settlement Canada Real, located on the outskirts of Madrid and populated mostly by Roma people, the largest slum in Europe, they tend to forget about Šutka in North Macedonia. Šutka has had its movie treatment as well, either in the shape of an exoticism-laden documentary The Šutka Book Of Records (Aleksandar Manić, 2005) or in the form of the latest fiction film by Goran Stolevski, Housekeeping For Beginners (2023), while it also served as the shooting location for Emir Kusturica’s Time Of Gypsies (1989) and Stole Popov’s Gypsy Magic (1997). Now, Canada Real also gets its film representation via Guillermo Galoe’s debut feature Sleepless City, which premiered at Cannes’ Critics’ Week sidebar.

In this “slice-of-life”-type of a film, the bare-bones plot revolves around our teenage protagonist having to grow up quickly. Tonino (Antonio “Toni” Fernández Gabarre, playing a fictionalised version of himself, like the other cast members) lives an aimless life in the slum, enjoying racing his prized white “galga” hound Atómica against other dogs in the neighbourhood, eating as much candy as he can and hanging about filming Instagram videos with his best friend Bilal (Bilal Sedraoui) whom he calls his “primo” (cousin), even though they are not related by blood. The life as Tonino knows it is about to change for good, as the city officials plan to bulldoze the illegal settlement and disperse the families to social housing, while Bilal is about to move to Marseille in France.

There are some disagreements within the family clan ruled by the iron fist of Chule (Jesus “Chule” Fernández Silva), since the younger members are willing to take the city officials’ offer, but the patriarch opposes it since he cannot imagine making a living any other way than collecting scrap metal. But Toni’s primary concern is to retrieve Atómica, whom Chule sold in order to buy a new plot of land.

Slums and illegal settlements within and on the outskirts of big cities were quite common in Europe throughout the 20th century, but the contemporary trends of cracking them down for gentrification purposes are predominant nowadays. The practice is quite brutal to the inhabitants, as it pays little attention to their needs and their way of life that supports the “ecosystem” that was created.

The “neo-neorealist” approach Galoe takes is akin to the work of Jonas Carpignano (A Chiara) and further down the road related to Fellini’s and Pasolini’s cinematic and, especially, literary works and it seems to be a fitting one. The non-professional actors come from the very milieu they portray and are selected properly, but guided with a light touch and a lot of freedom. The “star player” is, however, the director of photography Rui Poças, known for his work with art house cinema heroes including Miguel Gomes and Lucretia Martel. He captures the vibe of the community, but also the very confusing state of mind of the protagonist with a certain grace using a combination of hand-held and steadicam shots, but employing high contrasts between the natural colours of “real” life and highly filtered ones of the kids’ imagined virtual world.

In terms of Galoe, it was more about the researching and “packaging” the findings into the script, co-written with Víctor Alonso-Berbel. The milieu, the lead actor and part of the plot were explored previously by Galoe in his short Even Though It’s Night (2023), which also enjoyed a premiere at Cannes. But the similarities in proceedings between Sleepless City and Carla Simón’s Berlinale-winner Alcarràs (2022) are so striking that one could assume that it is one and the same movie “planted” in two different environments.

The inspiration for both might come from separate sources, experiences and motives and they were developed separately, but through the funds, public calls and labs that all have similar moulds to shape the films they are dealing with. In such a heavily “doctored” approach, sincerity and authenticity tend to get lost, which ultimately turns the film into an exercise in box-checking. That is exactly what happened with Sleepless City. The predictability of its proceedings makes it a snooze fest for a critic that already has some “mileage”.

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