21/05/2025 - CANNES 2025: Guillermo Galoe’s vibrant social-realist drama sees a young Roma teenager from Madrid’s exurban slums struggling to leave that world behind

Jesús Fernández Silva (left) and Antonio Fernández Gabarre in Sleepless City

Sleepless City [+see also:
trailer
interview: Guillermo Galoe
film profile] is the debut feature by director Guillermo Galoe, yet a large amount of its creative ambition seems to come down to its cinematographer, Rui Poças, famed for his collaborations with Miguel Gomes and Lucrecia Martel. He makes outer Madrid’s La Cañada Real slum as beautiful, lively and desirable as its lead figure, young Roma teenager Toni (Antonio Fernández Gabarre, playing himself, like the rest of the cast), perceives it, a palpable fact to anyone walking the main thoroughfare when the sunlight hits at the right angle. Poças literally delves into Toni’s own subjective PoV through his cameraphone footage, as the boy shoots the photogenic local muck and debris as well as his close friend Bilal (Bilal Sedraoui), who’s of Moroccan descent, in artificial filters that turn the sky a radioactive pink and green. All of this visual distinction helps distract us from the conventional and predictable narrative events, as well as the sometimes-negligible social detail that would truly help an understanding of the locale. It was one of the last films to premiere in this year’s Cannes Critics’ Week.

Toni’s grandfather Chule (Jesús Fernández Silva) has run a family-sustaining scrap-metal business for years, with the kid’s immediate family nowhere to be seen (and implied to have been involved with La Cañada Real’s notorious drug trade). The slum is also soon set to be bulldozed, with social services kindly helping the family relocate to a nearby development of high-rises, whose sterility and contrasting unnatural light Poças also emphasises in his lensing. So, for Toni’s relatives and the entire Roma community, the curtailing of their more free-flowing way of life has to be grappled with, especially as they’re not being displaced and made homeless completely. Although they are often low on power by night, and running water at any time, the identities of these environs and its people are indivisible.

The screenplay by Galoe and Victor Alonso-Berbel – honed in a research process lasting several years – doesn’t permit much interiority to Toni, preferring to follow his energetic trail around the area in search of human (and, indeed, animal) connection. Thankfully, the boy’s prized greyhound, Atómica, doesn’t become an overworked symbol for his loss of innocence or vulnerability; with Bilal also leaving La Cañada Real to join his relatives in Marseille, there’s something touching about Toni’s quest to reclaim the dog, after Chule sells it to some old associates of his to help fund a new plot of land (almost as a consolation for their leaving overall) in the countryside just outside the slum.

As said, the issues raised in Sleepless City can feel familiar, with more granular detail found in similar documentaries, or films less concerned with enchanting visual splendour. Yet, it’s also comparable to Carla Simón’s work (a filmmaker, of course, who is making her first Cannes competition appearance this week, with Romería [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile]) and 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, with two circular panning shots from Poças evoking this directly at the film’s closing.

Sleepless City is a co-production by Spain and France, staged by BTeam Prods, Sintagma Films, Buenapinta Media, Encanta Films, Les Valseurs and Tournellovision. Its world sales are managed by Best Friend Forever.