China-based sales agent Rediance has boarded Nele Wohlatz’s Sleep With Your Eyes Open and Huang Shuli’s short Goodbye First Love, ahead of their premieres at the Berlinale next month.
Sleep With Your Eyes Open will play in the festival’s competitive Encounters section, which was announced today. The comedy is set in a coastal city in Brazil over one hot summer, during which bonds grow between a heartbroken traveller from Taiwan, a man who runs an umbrella store and a woman who used to live in the city.
The cast combines newcomers with professional actors, including Wang Shin-Hong who has frequently worked on Midi Z films such as Ice Poison and The Road To Mandalay, Nahuel Pérez Biscayart (120 BPM), Chen Xiao Xin and Liao Kai Ro.
German-born Argentina-based director Wohlatz previously directed The Future Perfect, which won Locarno’s Golden Leopard for best first feature in 2016 and travelled to more than 70 international film festivals.
Sleep With Your Eyes Open is a Brazil-Argentina-Taiwan-Germany co-production. Producers are Emilie Lesclaux, Kleber Mendonça Filho of Cinemascópio, Violeta Bava, Rosa Martínez Rivero of Ruda Cine, Justine O., Roger Huang of Yi Tiao Long Hu Bao and Meike Martens of Blinker Filmproduktion.
It is also supported by ANCINE, TAICCA’s Taiwan International Co-funding Programme (TICP), INCAA and Nordmedia.
Goodbye First Love will premiere in the Berlinale’s short film competition and is the latest from China-born US-based Huang, who won the Cannes Queer Palm, the short film jury award at Sundance and best documentary short at the Golden Horse Awards in 2022 with Will You Look At Me.
His latest, also shot by and starring Huang, is about two men who reunite in Frankfurt and recall their time together in Beijing, during what might be the last time they meet.
Huang also works as a cinematographer, with credits including Farewell, My Hometown, which won the New Currents prize at Busan in 2021, and Borrowed Time, which will recieve its European premiere at Rotterdam.
The 2024 Berlinale will run February 15-24, while the concurrent European Film Market (EFM) will take place February 15-21.
No comments yet