Jaw-gaping, Rayo, a white greyhound, sprints after a hare over grassy fields, encouraged by Toni and family in a truck driven by his grandfather Chule: “Ciudad sin sueño” (“Sleepless City) opens with a sense of celebration and freedom, enjoyed by a Roma family living in La Cañada Real, a nine-mile road housing what is described as the biggest shanty town in southern Europe, a short drive west of Madrid.
Cut to the film’s next scene in Cañada Real where an excavator is ripping into the roof of a house as local authorities demolish Canada Real’s housing, offering to some, including Toni’s parents, accommodation in sterile housing blocks on the city outskirts, but which have tap water, lighting, a bedroom for everybody and a supermarket nearby.
Barrel-chested family patriarch Chule, whom Toni adores, a metal scrap collector, is not for moving. “Listen to the wind. We’re as big as this field,” he says, expending his arms. “That’s happiness,” he tells Toni, having driven them out to the countryside.
Though he hasn’t told Toni, Chule has already borrowed money from the local drug-dealer to buy land and build a legal home, selling Rayo into part of the deal. The family of Moroccan Bilal, Toni’s best friend, is moving to the French coast. Toni’s own days in Cañada Real look counted.
15, written off by the girl he likes as a metal scrap dealer, he’s in two minds about the move, as indeed is the film which channels the melancholy of an autumnal Western, a town overtaken by the sweep of gentrification, and the passing of an freer age.
Celebrating its world premiere in Cannes Critics’ Week on Monday, “Sleepless City” marks an auspicious feature debut for Spain’s Guillermo Galoe. He’s already a distinguished filmmaker who in 2023 had fiction short “Even Though It’s at Night,” a dry run for “Sleepless City,” playing main competition, at Cannes. “Night” won a Spanish Academy Goya Award for best fiction short film. Galoe’s early “Frágil Equilibrio” (2016) scooped another Goya, for best doc feature.
Put through the Cannes Festival’s Residence development program and sold by Brussels’ Best Friend Forever, “Sleepless City” will be distributed in Spain by BTeam Pictures.
It is produced from France by Les Valseurs and and Les Films des Tournelles. Producers in Spain take in Galoe’s own Madrid-based label Sintagma Films, alongside BTeam Prods, Buenapinta Media and Encanta Film, the latter three all backing Alauda Ruíz de Azua’s “Lullaby,” described by Pedro Almódovar as “undoubtedly the best debut in Spanish cinema for years.” If most early reviews of “Sleepless City” are anything to go by, they could be on to another winner.
Variety talked to Galoe just before “Sleepless City” bowed at Cannes.
What made you particularly interested in telling this story?
I was following the story of various family evictions and ended up in La Cañada Real. I was blown away. 15 minutes from central Madrid, 10 minutes from my own home, there’s a completely different world not that distant but completely on the margins, absolutely out of the world and time. It struck me to the quick, in intuitive and aesthetic terms. My films are based on experiences that I have of a world before my senses. I strike up a relationship with that world which is this case became a total fiction in a real space.
I believe you spent two years in La Cañada without shooting anything.
I was only able to work there daily, for weeks, from 2019….
Does that come from your documentary past where you have to live a reality before you know the story you’re going to tell?
Totally. I like cinema which is close to life, and relate to he world through a camera. We began to set up workshops, shooting small films with smartphones with kids and families.
The films that Toni and Bilal shoot, tinting objects, backgrounds, people’s faces or whole rubbish dumps, like in psychedelic dreams, could be seen as an escape from reality. But they also relate to stories the grandmother tells of mythical places with a multicoloured sky.
The [multi-colour tinted] images were great in terms of aesthetic play. And they allowed me to construct in images the legends which I heard there, combined with legends I heard from my own childhood. My grandparents are from Extremadura [in Spain’s southwest] and Portugal. Many of the gitanos who live in Cañada Real are from the same region. My grandparents walked the same fields, hunted with the same dogs, listened to the same legends. The grandmother, in the film from the very first moment, reminded me a lot of my own grandmother. It went straight to my heart.
Guillermo Arriaga once said that you should be able to sum up a film in just a few words. “Sleepless City,” for me, is a telling the story of bidding goodbye to a father.
My work, as I said, is exploring worlds in very different places to my own, to find in them what is also mine. As cinema is life for me and life is a journey, I was interested in talking about this, it’s at the emotional heart of the film.
And the father is of course a father figure, Chule.
The film talks about generational transmission. Toni’s parents are very young, too young to take totally care of their own children. So who looks after them? The grandparents. There always a network of care nearby.
That can be tremendously positive….
I agree. The film doesn’t want to romanticize La Cañada Real. But it does ask questions. This world is disappearing, but for what? A world which is terribly homogenized, anxiously capitalist and hyper-connected but very badly connected. There’s no sense of community in big cities. The question is whether we have to give up everything?
That’s a question that Toni asks himself. He’s of two minds about moving to Madrid. He marvels at water running from a tap in the flat his parents have been offered, but sees what he’s leaving behind: Chule, the fields, his dog, freedom.
The characters in the film feel a sense of loss. Toni loses not only his friend and community but and alos a childhood gaze, capable of wonder, astonishment. Toni is capable of seeing things in La Cañada that we adults don’t see. The film offers images different from what we’re used to seeing about places like La Cañada.
It’s a clarity when seeing the specific, unfiltered by concepts of adulthood, caught in the scenes when Toni and Bildal are down by the stream catching a lizard.
There’s a filter of adult life which is realizing you can’t have everything you want. Likewise, the film talks about freedom. For Chule, freedom is the countryside around La Cañada, shared with Toni. Many younger characters in the film seem to want to escape La Canada and its world.
Though made in many ways in a neo-realist mould, “Sleepless City” is notably stylish, boasting a top-notch DP in Rui Poças (“Zama,” “Grand Tour”). What were your aesthetic intentions in “Sleepless City”?
Camera use was for me is a space of freedom which I wanted to have in the film, but also extends the presence of the characters who film themselves via their cell phones. My sequence shots pick up on a cell phone style which shoots without cuts.
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