CM 2021

ANCINE

Hubert Bals Fund

Tabakalera

Ruda Cine

Do Fish Sleep With Their Eyes Open?

¿Duermen los peces con los ojos abiertos?

Pitch video

Goals at CineMart At CineMart we hope to complete the project financing through new alliances with potential co-producers and sales agents, with a special focus on Asia and Europe. Besides, we expect to expand and update the potential co-producers network, as well as the international funds.Synopsis Recife, Brazil. Lixue (22) doesn&rsquo;t ask herself if she likes her new town. She certainly doesn&rsquo;t want to ask whether the city likes her. She had already adopted a new place, Buenos Aires. But after several years, her family decides to move back to China and to send her to Brazil to live with an aunt. Her aunt Lili has made a fortune with an emporium of shops for Chinese import products, and lives with her family and her workers on the 22nd floor of a luxurious apartment building. Even without understanding Portuguese, Lixue realises that the upper-class Brazilian landlords certainly don&rsquo;t want the Chinese immigrant workers to take their elevator and fish in their garden, even if they can afford to be there. Lixue&rsquo;s days pass between the tower and the import shops and warehouses downtown, without any detour. In a corner of the warehouse, Lixue finds a box of blank postcards published by her aunt depicting Recife. But tourists don&rsquo;t come to Recife or buy postcards here anymore. Lixue recognises the city she lives in but doesn&rsquo;t know. She starts to write down her observations on the reverse sides and so becomes an analyst of the substitute city inside the tower, as well as its uprooted inhabitants. Animated as a voice-over, the notes to herself on the postcards accompany the film. In Lixue&rsquo;s chronicles, Bo (33) becomes important. Bo works for Aunt Lili and inhabits the servants&rsquo; quarters in the apartment, alongside other workers. He was a fisherman back in China. Bo tries to do everything that the unwritten Chinese immigrant manual asks for. He works a lot, rests little, and saves all he can. When he has saved enough, Bo opens his own umbrella shop, just before the rain season starts. But inexplicably the rain never arrives. Bo&rsquo;s business threatens to fail before he is able to grasp the situation. He never thought that living in the city, he might depend on the climate, as he once did as a fisherman. There&rsquo;s no manual for failure, except silence. Although she resists the relationship, Bo becomes a kind of a friend to Lixue. The complicity of throwing garbage out the window together thrills her, and Lixue needs to write her chronicles for someone. But when a watermelon falls from one of the high-rise windows and barely misses the two of them, things start changing once again. Lixue disappears from the city and from the film. What shouldn&rsquo;t happen in a screenplay, occurs constantly in the lives of the immigrant workers. Instead, Ah (22) arrives on the scene: the first tourist in Recife in years. Her physical resemblance to Lixue is astonishing, even with her distinctly elegant style. Ah suffers from insomnia and a broken heart. Circumstances send her to the city center and into Bo&rsquo;s umbrella shop. Later, she loses track of Bo, but she finds the postcards scrolled with Lixue&rsquo;s chronicles and starts following her tracks until she eventually comes to the towers the Chinese have now abandoned. Bo&rsquo;s only employee steals his meager profit. His friend gets murdered in an armed robbery. Bo can&rsquo;t sell his umbrellas and ends up burning them at the waste dump outside town where the Chinese merchants dispose of their &lsquo;failures.&rsquo; He went broke and now his savings are gone. In utter desperation, he swims out to sacrifice himself to the sharks, but even this particular suicide plan is a failure. At dawn, Ah encounters Bo on the beach, only for the second time. But after reading Lixue&rsquo;s postcards about him, Ah feels a strange sense of closeness to Bo. At his side, she can finally fall asleep.Director&rsquo;s Biography Nele Wohlatz was born in 1982 in Hannover, Germany and has been iving in Buenos Aires, Argentina since 2009. She studied scenography and philosophy at the University of Applied Arts Karlsruhe and film at the University Torcuato Di Tella, Buenos Aires. Her films were shown at festivals such as Locarno International Film Festival, IFFR, Viennale, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Mar del Plata International Film Festival, BAFICI, FIDMarseille and institutions such as Lincoln Center in New York and MoMA. Her solo feature debut El futuro perfecto won multiple awards (Pardo d&rsquo;oro for the Best First Film at the 2016 Locarno International Film Festival, Grand Jury Award at 2016 AFI Film Fest, Sichtwechsel Filmpreis at the 2016 Filmfest Hamburg, Best First Film at the 2016 ZINEBI and the Critic&rsquo;s Award at the 2016 D&rsquo;A Barcelona, amongst others). The film was invited to more than 70 international film festivals, and was released in theaters in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Costa Rica and the United States during 2017. In 2020 she was a resident at Villa Aurora in Los Angeles and a guest teacher at the University of Fine Arts of Hamburg. With her new feature project &iquest;Duermen los peces con los ojos abiertos? she has been invited to the residency program Ikusmira Berriak at Tabakalera San Sebasti&aacute;n, to the Jeonju Cinema Project Pitching in 2019 and also received the Hubert Bals Fund for development.&nbsp;

The dramaturgy of labour migration resists the heroic journey: when Lixue or Bo are needed elsewhere, they just leave. Lixue disappears from the film, but Ah, the tourist, stumbles over her tracks. The three are connected by their feeling of not belonging anywhere in the world. But what does belonging mean anyway? To whom, to what, does one belong?