Sleep With Your Eyes Open
Brazil / Argentina / Taiwan / Germany | 2024 | 97min | Drama | Mandarin Chinese / Portuguese / Spanish / English
Director: Nele WOHLATZ
Screening Time：10/19/2025
2:30pm-4:07pm
Synopsis:
A coastal city in Brazil, Kai arrives from Taiwan for holidays with a broken heart. A broken air conditioner sends her into Fu Ang’s umbrella store. He could become a friend, but the rainy season doesn't arrive and his shop disappears. While looking for Fu Ang, Kai discovers the story of Xiaoxin and a group of Chinese workers in a posh skyscraper. Kai finds herself strangely mirrored in Xiaoxin’s tale.
Performed by first time actors and professional ones, the protagonists of this quiet comedy of misunderstandings come and go unexpectedly. From one unknown city to the next, they follow the needs of their work more than a traditional dramaturgy. But over the course of a hot, slow summer, delicate bonds grow between them like islands in a sea full of sharks.
*Validated parking by the theater at the Trader Joe, 9290 Culver Blvd, Culver City, CA 90232
Trailer
Film Still
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About The Director
Nele WOHLATZ
Filmmaker Nele Wohlatz (1982, Germany) studied scenography and philosophy at the University of Applied Arts Karlsruhe and film at the University Torcuato Di Tella, Buenos Aires, where she lived for 12 years. In her films, she explores the connections between language and film language, as well as the boundary between fiction and documentary. Her work has been shown at festivals such as Locarno, Rotterdam, Viennale, Mar del Plata and institutions such as the Lincoln Center and MoMA in New York Her fiction debut THE FUTURE PERFECT (2016) won multiple awards, including the Golden Leopard for Best First Feature in Locarno, and was invited to more than 70 international film festivals.
Director's Statements
I made my last film with Chinese non-professional actors in Buenos Aires. We shot it entirely on the weekends, because during the week they all worked in Chinese supermarkets and import stores. The following weekend, there was always someone missing: they had either moved to another city, a new country, or back to China. One actress told me: “Now I am here, and I am doing well. I think I could go anywhere and adapt if the work demanded it. But there’s no place I feel like I belong to anymore.”
Up to that point I had been living in Argentina as a foreigner for many years and for different reasons I had lost my sense of home. What does belonging even mean? To whom and to what can one belong?
With DORMIR DE OLHOS ABERTOS, I was hoping to make a film that could take place in any city in the world. It would feature people who could go anywhere in the world and would still belong nowhere. What would a film, which declares the unsteady existence and the fleeting relationships of the characters to be its principles, against the rules of fiction, look like? What kind of common ground would we be working on if we were all strangers to each other? In the film, Xiaoxin describes what is happening around her. She gives names to things and expresses abstract feelings. Kai becomes her reader. Without ever meeting, they are important to each other.
Films are places we can always return to, places we can inhabit and find a home in.