Official Selection - 2017 New Directors/New Films
Official Selection - 2017 International Film Festival Rotterdam
WINNER, New Auteurs Grand Jury Award - AFI Fest 2016
COLORADO PREMIERE
Winner of the Best First Feature prize at the 2016 Locarno Film Festival, Nele Wohlatz’s film is a thematically rich, formally playful documentary/narrative hybrid where language barriers and cultural divides inform the lives of its characters but also the structure of the film itself. Seventeen-year old Xiaobin has arrived in Argentina, unable to speak a word of Spanish. She takes a job at a supermarket to pay for language courses. At work she meets a young Indian man Vijay, whom she starts dating despite their linguistic divide. The classes, the job, and the boyfriend she keeps secret from her family who operate a laundromat in the same country but seem worlds away. What Xiaobin learns in her language class she puts into practice on the outside. The more adept at the language she becomes, the more she is able to interfere with the narrative of the film. When she practices the conditional tense, she imagines what is possible.
Director Nele Wohlatz
Country Argentina
Year 2016
Runtime 65 min
Starring Xiaobin Zhang, Saroj Kumar Malik, Mian Jiang
Official Selection - 2017 International Film Festival Rotterdam
WINNER, New Auteurs Grand Jury Award - AFI Fest 2016
COLORADO PREMIERE
Winner of the Best First Feature prize at the 2016 Locarno Film Festival, Nele Wohlatz’s film is a thematically rich, formally playful documentary/narrative hybrid where language barriers and cultural divides inform the lives of its characters but also the structure of the film itself. Seventeen-year old Xiaobin has arrived in Argentina, unable to speak a word of Spanish. She takes a job at a supermarket to pay for language courses. At work she meets a young Indian man Vijay, whom she starts dating despite their linguistic divide. The classes, the job, and the boyfriend she keeps secret from her family who operate a laundromat in the same country but seem worlds away. What Xiaobin learns in her language class she puts into practice on the outside. The more adept at the language she becomes, the more she is able to interfere with the narrative of the film. When she practices the conditional tense, she imagines what is possible.
Director Nele Wohlatz
Country Argentina
Year 2016
Runtime 65 min
Starring Xiaobin Zhang, Saroj Kumar Malik, Mian Jiang
