We had the pleasure of meeting director Nele Wohlatz, whose intimate, yet isolated world of Chinese migrants in Recife, Brazil, is an emotional rapport that continues playfully with narrative structure.
In Nele Wohlatz’ first feature film, The Future Perfect, which won the Best First Feature Award at the 2016 Locarno Film Festival, tells the story of a Chinese migrant, Xiaobin, having just arrived in Argentina navigating and discovering herself through Spanish lessons in her everyday life. At one glance, the film may seem amateur and droll, but through a playful and inventive storytelling, she manages to find a singular voice in the use of structure and the bittersweet emotions underneath unfamiliarity and spontaneity.
Her follow up feature, Sleep With Your Eyes Open (Dormir de olhos abertos), is a step forward in her filmography building on the mundane and quotidian of a foreigner. Opening to an unexpected break-up at the airport before leaving from China to Recife, Brazil (The city portrayed in Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Pictures of Ghost), this film sneakily creeps up slowly with emotional depth.
Kai (Liao Kai Ro), a Chinese woman is on an unexpected visit from once a getaway to a solo trip where she meets Chinese migrants and discovers postcards from Xiaoxin (Chen Xiao Xin) a woman previously living there. Through the stories of the postcard, she finds yearning and connection from this unknown woman. Through belonging and not belonging, Wohlatz constructs a story of isolation and companionship through the eyes of being someone who’s losing their sense of home.
We had the great pleasure to sit down and talk with Nele on her latest film, which won the FIPRESCI Prize at this year’s 74th Berlinale.
Michael Granados: In your last film and in here, your protagonists are Chinese migrants. What made you want to revisit this community?
Nele Wohlatz: I wasn’t really trying to continue on the Chinese migrants, but about the feelings and issues about migration that were somehow related to my experience in Buenos Aires. In The Future Perfect, it is quite playful about the possibilities of creating identity or recreating/reinventing yourself after migration through language. This time around, it is more about arrival and optimism.
It was a complete coincidence that I met Kleber Mendonça Filho at the Viennale who told me about the twin towers in Recife which was an absurd urban myth of luxury complex apartments (which Kleber CGI’d out in his film Aquarius to fit the proper time setting). They were constructed as apartments for the elite. Out of a number of misunderstandings/circumstances, Chinese migrants began living there. The mere presence of Chinese immigrants led to tension among the locals.
As we started, Xiaobin (Lead role in The Future Perfect) and I started to understand after several years have passed in Argentina that we are never going to be naturally integrated in Argentina society. I started to lose the connection with my home country of Germany and the same with Xiaobin for China. I wanted to make a film about anyone who could be from anywhere and go anywhere and lose their sense of belonging.
“I wanted to make a film about anyone who could be from anywhere and go anywhere and lose their sense of belonging.”
Michael Granados: So was that how Kleber became a producer on the film?
Nele Wohlatz: After some months after traveling for The Future Perfect, I kept thinking about the anecdote he told me. So I sent him an email asking if he was going to make a film about those towers because I was thinking that I could make a film there.
When I was invited to Recife for their film festival, I wanted to bring Xiaobin to help research and interview the Chinese community. We were able to access spaces and the local Chinese communities because Xiaobin was also from the same province of the Chinese immigrants. This led to Kleber’s curiosity because I felt that I could offer another view, especially from foreign filmmaker’s perspective on Recife.
Michael Granados: Since your work deals with your own experiences, how did non-fiction/reality affect the story? Was there much improvisation?
Nele Wohlatz: I work with non-professional actors and even though the film is informed by reality, the script is written thoroughly.
In this case, they are not playing themselves, but are coming from the community working in Recife. Most of the Chinese non-professional actors came from Sao Paulo because the people I secretly hoped to cast from Recife went back to China.
Michael Granados: Can you talk about the structure of the story (postcards) within the story? It reminded me of cinema’s relationship with its viewers and how we are enriched with the stories and our reaction to it.
Nele Wohlatz: I wanted someone to mirror my foreign perspective because I’m not a migrant worker. Kai represents me as a foreign filmmaker.
The film is not only about the feeling of not belonging, but how we can construct belonging once we lost it and what alternatives there are apart from being the town where you were born, as well as spending your life there which is not the reality for most people.
One important aspect were the moments of friendship and the other is they all kind of suffer from abstract feelings of not feeling well. Xiaoxin (the author of the postcards from the past) reflects the work of an author, filmmaker, writer, or artist, taking those abstract feelings, but giving them an expression. Kai becomes her reader, so this was my way of creating this author/reader dialogue which is just as important as the author.
Michael Granados: Do you think you will continue making films on immigrants?
Nele Wohlatz: For me, the motive of starting a film is abstract, more-so philosophical or a feeling. I search for the context and where to put it. It’s possible that I could continue on that subject because you can do any film about immigration.
Now I am starting to write a script to shoot in Germany about coming back. All of a sudden, it’s challenging because I’m struggling how to achieve this distance to write about this place I’ve been away from for so long.
