The Wages of Sin

Gambling has a religious beauty to it: Blind faith, intense dedication, and a neverending hope for redemption form part of the gambler’s creed. Then there’s the glamour associated with it, whose attainment is the very gospel of the game. It is, however, in the act of losing oneself in the mathematical complexity that the player reveals his nihilism, loneliness, and aimless greed.

It is these qualities that Arizona filmmaker Lisanne Skyler explores in her documentary Dreamland. Following various full-time residents of Las Vegas for a two-year period, she casts an eye beyond the impressive casino hotels on the strip and onto the smaller, seedier gambling joints scattered throughout Sin City.

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