“The starting point was my feeling of being lost between two countries. I lived in Buenos Aires for twelve years, and at the time when life there stopped working for me, I had been away from Germany for so long that I was wondering where to go next,” said director Nele Wohlatz at the debate about her film Sleep with Your Eyes Open. The film, which competed in the Encounters section at this year’s Berlinale, follows the lives of several people wandering around the world with the feeling that they don’t belong anywhere.
In writing the script, the filmmaker was inspired by stories of people she had met. But then she lost them, so she spent a long time searching for the right actors to play these characters on screen. One of them is Taiwanese Liao Kai Ro, who also participated in the screening at KVIFF. “Although my character’s past is different, her personality is quite like mine. So all I had to do was act natural in front of the camera,” Liao Kai Ro praised the filming.
Wohlatz revealed that the script changed even during acting rehearsals, but only six weeks of shooting and a multilingual cast didn’t allow for many changes. The debate ended with the topic of postcards, which also appear in the film. “When you’re somewhere for the first time, everything feels as if you found yourself in a post card, that’s why I included them,” the director explained. When asked if she likes to send postcards, Kai Ro Liao replied: “I send postcards to my parents, but I don’t write anything on them – I draw pictures.”
