Sleepless City

The city that doesn’t sleep is La Cañada Real, the biggest shanty town in southern Europe, just a short drive from Madrid. This is home to fifteen-year-old Toni (Antonio Fernandez Gabarre) and his extended gitano family, a place of freedom but extreme poverty, with no running water and sketchy electricity. Change is in the air. The authorities are intent on razing the slums and willing to rehouse the inhabitants in modern apartment buildings. Toni’s father is ready for it, but his grandfather Chule flatly refuses to move — even selling his beloved greyhound to purchase some land and build his own house.

The first dramatic feature by documentary filmmaker Guillermo Galoe, this is a scintillating slice of contemporary neo-realism, with real people playing versions of themselves, and a vivid sense of place and community. The DP is Rui Poças, celebrated for his collaborations with Lucrecia Martel (Zama) Joao Pedro Rodriguez (The Ornithologist) and Miguel Gomes (Grand Tour), and the film finds many striking textures, neatly incorporating cell phone footage shot by Toni and the other youths in La Cañada. It’s a kind of elegy for a vanishing life, but never sentimental, always infused in generosity.

City Without Sleep brings to mind the writings and early films of Pier Paolo Pasolini, in which the slums on the outskirts of Rome were celebrated as the last bastion of resistance against the advances of consumer society. Reclaiming the legacy of the Italian master, Galoe depicts a state of material misery, but also celebrates the brilliance of an emancipated community, extremely vulnerable to the siren song of a savage capitalism masked behind the promises of so-called progress.

Manu Yanez, Fotogramas

Vibrant, melancholy and immersive… a universal message about loss, resilience and hope that deserves to open eyes further afield.

Jonathan Holland, Screen International

A sign of where the newer generation of Spanish directors are taking the national cinema beyond Almodóvar, and beyond historical memory recollections of the Civil War and the Franco era. Galoe, like his peers, sees the now, the contemporary, with literal 360° flair.

David Katz, Cineuropa