For just over a decade, the German filmmaker Nele Wohlatz has worked in South America, directing films about immigrants and language. In that same period, she has made the transition from documentary filmmaking to something a tad more hybrid, with her newest film, Sleep With Your Eyes Open (2024), unmistakably being a work of fiction. Set in Brazil’s northeastern city of Recife, Wohlatz’s latest follows Kai (Liao Kai Ro), a broken-hearted tourist who stumbles upon a series of postcards describing the experience of a group of Chinese workers living in a luxury skyscraper. (In case Recife rings a bell, that’s because hometown auteur Kleber Mendonça Filho has popularized it in his work; moreover, it’s worth noting that he was an executive producer on Wohlatz’s film.) Divided between Kai’s misadventures in Recife and the stories narrated in the postcards she finds, Sleep With Your Eyes Open elegantly moves between its two overlapping narratives. Wohlatz’s control of these narrative slides is what makes the film so exciting, both as a protean work of storytelling and a multi-faceted portrait of an immigrant community.
Among the many things Wohlatz balances with the utmost precision in Sleep With Your Eyes Open is tone. The film, which centers around Chinese immigrants in search of a better life in the Americas, is inherently loaded with a sense of sadness, paying close attention to how loneliness can be exacerbated by unfamiliar surroundings. But, aware that there exists an entire canon dedicated to underscoring the many miseries associated with immigration, Wohlatz works in bits of comedy into her film. As soon as Kai arrives in Recife, she has to contend with a malfunctioning mini-split AC that beeps all night and makes her already awful jetlag even worse. So as to not spoil the punchline this incessant beeping gives rise to, I’ll just state that Wohlatz’s film is very attentive to small details and their effects on daily life.
Wohlatz is incredibly aware of things that stand out, and instead of pointing to them, lets them reveal themselves onscreen in a manner that forces the viewer to register their strangeness. In much the same way that she reveals the mini-split to be a consequence of shoddy construction work through her camerawork, Wohlatz also makes evident how her film’s central skyscraper is a total eyesore when seen from Recife’s city limits. Like all of cinema’s great comedy directors, Wohlatz understands how to organize her mise-en-scène. She knows the difference between order and disorder in a frame, and how when things are out of place, a laugh is almost always inevitable.
That Wohlatz has ended up making films about people who feel out of place, or quite literally have been displaced, is also inevitable given her own criss-crossing, transcontinental career. Her films are rooted in her experience: of moving to a new country, of learning a new language, of adapting to a new culture. She’s a global filmmaker, but one who understands how fraught that descriptor is. And so, rather than foreground the brutalities of the many bureaucratic systems that monitor the movement of people across borders, Wohlatz offers the cinema a different spin on the immigrant story. While she never denies the hardships her characters face in moving to a new country, she makes sure to emphasize how much freedom they are able to exercise in their new environment, transforming the real-life anecdotes that she gathers through interviews into wonderful, free-wielding narratives with no moral lessons tacked on.
Sleep With Your Eyes Open screens this evening, September 9, and on September 10 and 11, at Anthology Film Archives.
