"I don't have superpowers and I'm not flying in spaceships," stated 36-year-old Leonor Varela, who plays Luz Martinez in the independent science fiction drama Sleep Dealer. The half-Chilean, half-French actress continued, “Instead, the film’s futuristic trappings (Sleep Dealer is named after a factory whose technology enables laborers to remotely work themselves to death without having to cross any border) are not that far-fetched. It's a very near future where things are very plausible, which made my job easier because I didn't have to imagine all that much. It just made it very realistic, very specific and concrete."

Varela’s personal life did indeed prepare her for such a role. As a young child, her family arrived in Costa Rica after fleeing Chile to leave the brutal dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Afterwards, she ended up residing in Germany, America and France, where she studied. Along this path, she learned four languages--English, Spanish, French and Italian--which allowed her education to be almost as diverse as the various countries she was able to call home during her travels.

“I love acting in English,” Varela said. “But I also find it important to return to my roots and speak my first language, which this film allowed me to do.”

The Spanish-language film will be released in 25 American markets on April 17 and will provide English subtitles. Although Dealer didn’t have a large budget, it made the most of its locations.

The script reached the actress through the typical channel, director to agent to actress, but when Varela read the script, the themes within the story captured a desire in her to play the role.

“There are several themes,” Varela stated. “It's hard to pick one. It's such a rich film in terms of the themes and the topics that are really being used to tell the story. For me, as an immigrant, I'm always fascinated by the topic of immigration and how to export labor without exporting the bodies. I thought that was just so on the money. Because of my own passion for the environment, I have seen water become such a necessity in the world, and it's becoming a really big problem. The theme of the corporations selling water and keeping it was also really fascinating to me. The technology is just fascinating to me, and the way it's used in the film would be so incredible if that was the case but frightening at the same time.”

Sometimes, actors might prepare for a role differently when themes are stronger than the actual special effects. “I think it's a two-tiered process,” Varela said. “Once you read the script and you understand and relate to the world and you decide that you want to go for this and you want to do it, you have to embrace the reality of what's being presented, the reality of this new world. The second part is making it, and in the doing, you're faced with all the sewing buttons and eyelash glue that make the low-tech seem like high-tech. As an actor, I think the most important part is to fall in love in the first process and take the time to really be submersed in this world and make it yours and claim it. The second part, you just have to go with the flow, especially when you're doing independent filmmaking and low-budget independent filmmaking, where the money is really on the screen as you see it.”

Dealer’s $2.5-million budget was raised for the film four years after director Alex Rivera teamed up with the film’s producer following the presentation of the Sleep Dealer concept at the Sundance Director’s Lab in 2003. Rivera is a New York-based digital media artist and filmmaker and this, his first feature film, premiered at Sundance in 2008, winning two awards, including the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award. Rivera is a Sundance Fellow and a Rockefeller Fellow. His work, which addresses concerns of the Latino community through a language of humor, satire and metaphor, has also been screened at The Berlin International Film Festival, New Directors/New Films, The Guggenheim Museum, PBS, Telluride and other international venues.

Even though Rivera is now quite involved in creating films, his career had been headed in a different direction until he switched to filmmaking.

“I became a filmmaker, in some ways, to avoid writing papers,” Rivera stated. “While I was studying political science, I was searching for a way to make dynamic and accessible arguments about what I saw happening in the world. I found video and film, and convinced my professors at Hampshire (a private liberal arts college in Western Massachusetts) to let me make videos instead of writing final papers.”

Even though he moved out of the political science classroom, Rivera has incorporated his educational background into the subjects of his films.

“The theme of immigration has always been central to my work,” began Rivera. “I’m interested in immigrant stories as windows into urgent realities: global economics, labor politics, border policy, identity, nostalgia and the search for ‘home.’” Sleep Dealer had its beginnings in such an atmosphere.

“The first seed of an idea came to me in 1997,” said Rivera. “I was living in New York City, working as an editor, and the dot-com economy was booming. The cover of WIRED magazine prophesized the coming of a ‘Global Village.’ At the same time, the Clinton administration was executing ‘Operation Gatekeeper,’ and building a wall on the border with Mexico. Governor Wilson in California was supporting a series of propositions that attacked immigrant children. Something odd was happening. As the world was connecting through technology, it was becoming more divided by borders.”

“Then it dawned on me that the ‘Global Village,’ seen from the other side of the giant border wall, must look pretty strange,” continued Rivera. “So, I started a process of thinking about the future from that point of view. Over the years, I mapped out a near-future world of open technology and closed borders, and I slowly began to imagine a few characters that would live in this world, and give us access to different points of view on it. The longest struggle for me was getting to know the characters and how their lives intertwined. I worked with my co-writer, David Riker, and found three characters: Memo Cruz (Luis Fernando Pena), the migrant worker in Mexico who works in a futuristic sweatshop; Rudy Ramirez (Jacob Vargas), a soldier in America who uses remote control drones to protect corporate assets around the world; and Luz Martinez (Varela), a futuristic blogger who sells her memories, using technology to let her audience see what she sees.”

The characters and the story all fell together in this independent film, which in this case means something very positive.

“If ‘independent film’ refers only to a question of financing, and the unique challenges of making and distributing films outside the studios, then I guess independent film is doing fine,” said Rivera. “It seems that every year there are a few films made outside the studios that make an impact.”

Sleep Dealer has a chance to be one of those films. It should do moderately well at the box office but, looking into the future, the movie should find an extended life thanks to DVD sales.

Sleep Dealer is now playing in limited release.

For more information, visit the film’s official Web site.