Sleepless City (2025) Movie Drinking Game
Take a Drink: for shenanigans
Take a Drink: for every economic setback
Take a Drink: for every dog scene
Take a Drink: whenever the colors go all crazy
Do a Shot: whenever a Roma kid smokes or buys cigarettes (which I can attest is a thing – in Romania, at least)
By: Henry J. Fromage (Two Beers) –
Many excellent films have been made about and among the Roma communities of Europe, a people reviled and romanticized, one forever apart.
Sleepless City continues that tradition in style, following 15-year-old Toni as he navigates a time of turbulence, from Spanish authorities threatening to tear down their off-the-grid homes to the departure of his best friend and sale of his beloved greyhound.
A Toast
Director Guillermo Galoe shows a skills as both a dramatist and a documentarian in his feature debut. He’s not the first to enlist non-professional actors and shoot among the community he’s portraying, and not even the first to take this approach with a Roma community. However, he directs with assuredness and flashes of style all his own, like the uncanny photonegative color scaling of the smartphone videos the kids shoot of their imaginative escapades among scavenged sheet metal. He finds the joys in growing up this way- this far from miserabilist neorealism.
He draws excellent naturalistic acting from this cast of non-professionals and unknowns, demonstrating the tight familial structure of the Roma that persists in the face of extreme poverty and governmental indifference. However, there’s a growing conflict between the old and new ways- between that famously fierce independence and resilience and a desire to build something that can last, that can make things even incrementally better, which the elders see as some form of giving up, giving in.
Beer Two
This film can be as rambling as Toni’s family’s lifestyle, moving between incidents that only occasionally develop the main plotline. There’s charm to this approach, though.
Verdict
Sleepless City drops us into the life of a young Roma boy as an tries to hold onto what he can in a time of change.
