City of Dreams Review: A Terrifying Reality

Mohit Ramchandani’s City of Dreams exposes the harrowing truth of child labor in the fast fashion industry—a truth that many turn a blind eye to.

However, they don’t realize how their fantasies could end up being massacred at the sight of its real face, and so could their childhood innocence. In the worst possible outcome, their freedom could be ripped away. That’s the viciousness director Mohit Ramchandani dares to confront. His film tucks us in one of the darkest corners of “the land of opportunities,”  where people sell their moral compasses for profit and power.

City of Dreams, inspired by true events, takes us on a journey with Jesús (Ari Lopez) as he is taken to America to seemingly fulfill his dream of becoming a soccer superstar. His story takes a terrifying turn when he realizes he has been trafficked and sold to a sweatshop, where enslaved youth work 18-hour days in torturous conditions. The brave Jesús is ready to do whatever it takes to claw his way out, but he might not be ready for everything it’s about to cost him.

The film makes the bold choice to keep Jesús silent throughout the majority of its runtime, detaching him even further from everything familiar due to the firm language barrier. To enforce that idea, Jesús is branded with his name like a barcode, inked on the side of his hand, and perpetually immobilized by the fear and pain of his circumstances. 

The extremely limited amount of speaking lines poses a complicated challenge to Ari Lopez. Jesús embodies a character who must drive the narrative without uttering a single word but charge every frame with a thousand. We sympathize with the boy and the excruciating suffering he is forced to grit his teeth through, we root for him to escape out of this hell, and those feelings are all prompted by the authenticity we could see behind his transportive eyes in every scene.

Portraying Jesús as non-verbal is just one of the many creative decisions that I didn’t expect to encounter, and, for a film of this caliber, there might have been a tad too many of them for the movie to work cohesively from a directing standpoint. 

At times, Ramchandani heavily leans into dream-like imagery to convey Jesús’ primary character trait: he’s a dreamer. In the opening moments, his imagination makes him see the world through a different lens and he can picture himself in the soccer stadium, cheered on and admired by thousands of fans, even when he’s playing with his peers in the muddy grass. As he becomes trapped in the sweatshop, his dreams turn into nightmare visions of his mother and borderline spiritual visuals. Compared to the rest of the film, those sequences stand out as quite abstract, oversaturated with slow-motion editing and metaphorical horror-adjacent elements. However, not only do they leave the pacing somewhat disjointed, but they don’t manage to add much to a story that is much scarier and much darker when in the plane of reality. 

City of Dreams didn’t need to take as many overly dramatic liberties as it did. The film is most compelling when it takes you through this important story in its rawest possible form. When it does, it’s devastating and heart-wrenching to watch. It’s a testament to the ugly greed and cruelty of our current world. 

With every passing minute, it becomes increasingly apparent that this is more than just the tale of one boy fighting back. It’s for every child and every victim of this tyranny and the dysfunctionality of the system that’s supposed to prevent it from happening. Everyone involved in these operations is a victim of the capitalistic rot, and that’s subtly hinted at multiple times as we begin to understand more of each character’s inner motivations and struggles, even those of Jesús’ superiors. City of Dreams is not without its flaws in its execution, which could very well be attributed to a lack of directorial experience or artistic self-service, but this is all largely overpowered by how much the film needs to exist. Mohit Ramchandani, in pairing with Ari Lopez, delivers a horrific wake-up call about the inhumanity of modern slavery that is just as hard to watch as it is necessary.

City of Dreams will be released in US theaters on August 30, 2024.