Sleepless City Review: Teenager’s Lens on a Vanishing Shantytown

Guillermo Galoe’s first feature, showcased at the 2025 Cannes Critics’ Week, follows Toni, a Roma teenager whose home in Madrid’s sprawling La Cañada Real faces demolition. Shot like a docu-drama, the film captures daily life under threat while tracing Toni’s quest for meaning amid uncertainty.

By blending non-professional actors with smartphone POV footage, Galoe crafts a coming-of-age tale that echoes the social-realist tradition of Indian parallel cinema—think Satyajit Ray’s focus on community and naturalism—yet remains grounded in contemporary European struggles.

The film’s heartbeat is Toni’s relationship with his greyhound, Rayo, a silent witness to family tensions and fleeting joy. Galoe invites viewers into a world where eviction looms as an ever-present force, and a boy’s search for freedom mirrors broader questions of identity and belonging across global cinema.

Streets of Resistance: The World of La Cañada Real

La Cañada Real emerges as more than setting—it becomes a character shaped by geography, makeshift shelters, and failing utilities. Galoe’s camera captures ten-mile rows of patched-together homes, electricity lines draped like vines, and dusty lanes where children race quad bikes.

Lay-recorded smartphone clips, tinted in hyperreal hues, recall the handheld intimacy in Mumbai’s small-town dramas such as Anand Patwardhan’s documentaries, bringing viewers close to the rhythms of Roma and Moroccan families. The threat of eviction by suburban high-rise developments underscores tensions between communal bonds and modern urban policy—an issue that resonates with India’s own history of slum clearances around Mumbai.

Scenes of multi-generational gatherings, shared stories under dim streetlights, and spontaneous music at local fairs ground the narrative in lived experience, inviting international audiences to witness a multicultural micro-society facing displacement.

Faces of Displacement: Character Arcs and Performances

At the center stands Toni (Antonio Fernández Gabarre), whose restlessness feels universal: a teenager balancing childhood pleasures with questions of purpose. His use of a phone camera offers a window into his mind—moments of wonder at water gushing from a tap, frustrations when his friend Bilal departs for France.

Bilal’s exit echoes themes in Mira Nair’s multicultural films, where characters bridge continents yet struggle with belonging. Jesús Fernández Silva’s Chule, Toni’s grandfather and community patriarch, embodies pride and duty. In one unguarded scene, Chule refuses to consider life in sterile tower blocks, echoing the paternal figures in parallel cinema who prioritize cultural roots over convenience.

The greyhound, Rayo, provides a motif for freedom: Toni’s determination to recover the dog from a debt sale drives key emotional beats. Supporting neighbors—grandparents sharing Roma legends, children selling lizards for €100—illustrate solidarity and survival tactics. Naturalistic performances keep dialogue spontaneous, with moments of silence speaking volumes about generational divides and shared resilience.

Frames of Hope: Cinematic Craft and Themes

Rui Poças’s cinematography opens with a sweeping aerial shot that maps the settlement’s sprawl, later shifting to tight 360° pans that envelop Toni in his community’s bustle. These visual choices recall the fluid camera work of Deepa Mehta’s early projects, where location becomes emotional landscape.

Filtered smartphone clips inject sudden bursts of color—radioactive pink skies over debris—heightening contrast between youthful optimism and harsh surroundings. Ambient sounds—street chatter, dogs barking, distant engines—replace a musical score, a tactic seen in Indian realist films to root viewers in place. Editing alternates lingering takes at family meals with fast-cut chase sequences through alleyways, mirroring Toni’s oscillation between introspection and action.

Recurring themes—water from a tap symbolizing basic rights, Rayo as a link to tradition, animals roaming free—underscore questions of displacement and cultural preservation. Through these stylistic moves, Galoe positions Sleepless City within a global conversation on marginal communities, offering a window into stories often overlooked by mainstream cinema.

Sleepless City premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival in the Critics’ Week section on May 19, 2025, and was awarded the SADC Prize for Best Screenplay. It is scheduled for theatrical release in Spain on September 3, 2025, distributed by BTeam Pictures.

Full Credits

Director: Guillermo Galoe

Writers: Guillermo Galoe, Víctor Alonso-Berbel

Producers: Manuel Calvo, Marisa Fernández Armenteros, Marina García López, Álex Lafuente

Co-Producers: Anne-Dominique Toussaint, Damien Megherbi, Justin Pechberty

Cast: Antonio Fernández Gabarre (as Tonino), Bilal Sedraoui (as Said), Jesús Fernández Silva (as Chule), Luis Bertolo

Director of Photography (Cinematographer): Rui Poças

Editor: Victoria Lammers