'City Without Sleep': The Cañada Real struggle reaches the Cannes Film Festival of luxury and movie stars.

It's been two years since Guillermo Galoe premiered his short film Although It's Night at the Cannes Film Festival, and the Cañada Real is still without electricity. The largest informal settlement in Spain—and one of the largest in Europe—has around 7,000 residents along the strip it occupies between Madrid, Getafe, Rivas, and Coslada , and several of its sectors have been in the dark since October 2020. The neighborhood is also being dismantled with plans to redevelop it in the future, and many of its families have been relocated. These two themes—rehousing and the lack of electricity—are the two starting points of Ciudad sin sueño , the feature film born from that short with which Galoe is now competing in Critics' Week at Cannes.

As luck would have it, the 78th Cannes Film Festival opened on the same day as the death of José Mujica , former president of Uruguay and protagonist of Frágil equilibrio (2016), the documentary that made Galoe famous and for which he won two Goya Awards. In this first non-fiction film, the Madrid-born director proposed an intercontinental journey of intersecting stories starring four voices affected by the economic crisis — the occasional one and the endemic one .

Galoe connects stories from a Japanese executive subjugated by a job that drains every corner of his soul to a Spanish family facing eviction , and a community of sub-Saharan Africans yearning to cross the Strait . Mujica's words and spirit served as a thread to weave together the different stories about the various forms of slavery in the contemporary world. It was also the first time Galoe visited the Cañada Real.

From this documentary perspective comes Ciudad sin sueño , a fiction constructed on the foundations of reality and starring the residents of La Cañada themselves . Galoe recovers the protagonist of her short film, Toni ( Antonio Fernández Gabarre ), a fifteen-year-old boy who faces separation from his best friend Bilal ( Bilal Sedraoui ) due to the pair's relocation. On the one hand, Toni's family, of Roma ethnicity, is considering accepting one of the apartments offered by the authorities to leave La Cañada. On the other hand, Bilal's family, originally from Morocco , wants to move to Marseille with the rest of their cousins. The promise: to finally swim in the sea.

If Although It's Night relied more on imagination and mystery, City Without Sleep shifts toward the social portrait of a settlement unknown beyond the news. Galoe has dedicated the space of the Cañada to cinema, as Pasolini advocated, and has succeeded in making its residents want to feel and be part of a film that serves both as a coming-of-age story (for the protagonist) and a testimony of death (for the Cañada). Starting from the same point, the separation of the two kids , City Without Sleep confronts the expansion of Toni's universe, which extends to a family in which the grandfather, the patriarch, a scrap metal dealer by profession, has a great attachment to the place he considers home and refuses to leave, and to a neighborhood in which illegal business—whether drug trafficking or exotic animal trafficking—is part of everyday life.

After filming Fragile Balance , Galoe returned to La Cañada to teach film workshops to young people, using cell phones as cameras. The director revived this resource, that of images supposedly shot by the characters Toni and Bilal, to make the viewer participate in that adolescent perspective that moves from childhood play to adulthood. A game that uses a scrapped car or an appliance dump as an amusement park. A step toward maturity condensed in the pack of cigarettes that Toni always carries with him .

The director's perspective on the Cañada itself has also changed. While the short film approached the space from the mystery —and almost magic—of the night, of the legends surrounding the bonfire, Ciudad sin sueño yields to a more daytime and social interest , conscious of access to a unique and disappearing reality. Perhaps the commitment to the host community has made the film embrace its political discourse more strongly than a more suggestive and ambiguous cinematic rhetoric .

Now with a deeper voice than in the short film, Toni serves as a vehicle to explore the corners of La Cañada , that dusty avenue we'll have walked through at the end of the film, those different neighborhoods where Arab hairdressers and gypsy bars coexist . And those excavators that fill the landscape with rubble, demolishing house after house, all built by their own hands. And, in the distance, the glass and steel towers of Madrid , so close and yet so far away, a mirage on the other side of the desert. Toni struggles between watching his childhood world disappear—his house, his friendship with Bilal, and his relationship with his grandfather—and embracing a new life with new possibilities in the city. The director also presents this first love, and does so in a naturalistic way, without sentimentality or artifice, from a place of curiosity , in one of the film's great discoveries.

City Without a Dream opens with a greyhound race in the dusty, desert landscape surrounding La Cañada. And it's Toni's greyhound that connects the stories of the two Roma families engaged in a cold war of concepts about honesty and the means to earn a living. Because La Cañada Real is also " the largest drug supermarket in Spain ," the film starkly portrays the drug addicts , who form another kind of slum within the settlement.

Galoe is the second Spanish director to compete with his feature films in this year's Cannes Film Festival, following Oliver Laxe's Sirat and Carla Simón's Romería , the latter two in the Official Section. This year, it also coincides with Rodrigo Sorogoyen 's presidency of the jury at Critics' Week, where City Without a Dream will compete against titles such as Shih-Ching Tsou's Taiwanese Left Handed Girl , Thailand's Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke's A Useful Ghost , the LGBTQI comedy in which a woman's spirit possesses a vacuum cleaner, and Sven Bresser 's Dutch Rietland .