‘Sleep With Your Eyes Open’: Berlin Review

Dir: Nele Wohlatz. Brazil/Argentina/Taiwan/Germany. 2024. 97mins

How can a rootless life allow any sense of belonging? Director Nele Wohlatz’s first feature since The Future Perfect (winner of best first feature at Locarno in 2016) is an exploration of exile, absence and loneliness infused with a wistful longing for a place called home. Wohlatz brings a light touch to some serious, state of the world issues creating a film both playful and profound. Extensive festival support should follow a world premiere in Berlin’s Encounters.

A film about belonging in a world where vast populations are in a limbo, lost in transit and lost in translation

Born in Germany and resident in Brazil for many years, Wohlatz seems to bring many personal emotions to bear on Sleep With Your Eyes Open, a film about the sacrifices and disappointments experienced by those far from home and the little bonds that can mean so much. Fresh starts and new faces are recurring elements in a tale that begins with Taiwanese woman Kai (Liao Kai Ro) at an airport awaiting her boyfriend. When he never shows up, she decides to travel alone to a planned holiday in the coastal Brazilian town of Recife. Kai’s solo traveller is a mixture of forlorn and intrepid, invested with an impish charm as she drifts through a day at the beach, an afternoon at the market and her first taste of a caipirinha cocktail.

During her holiday, Kai encounters Chinese native Fu Ang (Wang Shin-hong) who now runs a stall selling umbrellas. He scans the blue sky seeking the rain clouds that might be the salvation of his business. Fu Ang most acutely embodies the films chief concerns, living under his own cloud of homesickness. A fisherman who now rarely fishes, he misses the food he once loved, the places he knew and yet feels he cannot go home because everything will have changed. He even feels that time abroad marks an individual in subtle ways. “ Do you think my body odour is changing?” he asks his flatmates and fellow workers, including Leo (played by an effortlessly multi-lingual Nahuel Perez Biscayart) from Portugal. “Will I smell normal again when I go back home?”

Fu Ang shares a luxury apartment with fellow Chinese who have arrived in Brazil seeking a new life and a successful business opportunities. His story intertwines with that of Xiao Xin (Chen Xiao Xin) who has arrived from Argentina to spend time with her businesswoman aunt, the apartment’s owner. She keeps a diary of her days on a set of postcards that eventually come into the possession of Kai. As Kai reads and Xiao Xin writes, their lives mirror and reflect each other.

This is very much a film about belonging in a world where vast populations are in a limbo, lost in transit and lost in translation. There are constant images of people cast adrift – Fu Ang floating in the sea at night, Kai asleep on a bus going nowhere. The casting mix of professional and non-professional actors works well and Taiwan’s Liao Kai Ro particularly impresses, making Kai a very likeable, sympathetic figure. 

The overall tone might sound chilly and existential but the colourful vibrancy of the setting – the markets, the carnival, the beach – and the whimsical comic moments lend the film a warmth. When a human connection is established or someone comes under threat, the fleeting fragility of life really does hit home.