Biography
Nele Wohlatz was born in Hanover, Germany in 1982 and studied Fine Arts and Literature in Braunschweig. From 2003 to 2009 she studied scenography, media art and philosophy at the State Academy of Design in Karlsruhe. For her mid-length graduation film "Schneeränder" (2009), a portrait of her grandmother who reassembles newspaper articles in her diaries, Wohlatz was awarded the Young Talent Prize at the Duisburg Film Week.
Shortly thereafter, Wohlatz moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina, where she enrolled in the postgraduate program "Laboratorio de Cine" at the private Torcuato Di Tella University. After completing this program, she stayed in Argentina until 2019, where she made several films. She co-directed with Gerardo Naumann the documentary feature "Ricardo Bär" (AR/DE 2013), a portrait of a young German-Argentine living in a remote Baptist community. For the 19-minute documentary "La mochila perfecta" (2014), she accompanied her mother, an environmental activist, to Cuba to protect an endangered species of snail.
Nele Wohlatz's first feature film as sole director was "El futuro perfecto" (2016), a hybrid of documentary and fiction about a young Chinese woman who moves to Argentina with her parents and tries to adapt to the new environment in her own quirky way. The film won several festival awards, including Best First Feature at the Locarno Film Festival, the New Auteurs Grand Jury Award at the AFI Fest in Los Angeles, and the Sightseeing Film Award at the Hamburg Film Festival.
In addition to her work as a filmmaker, Nele Wohlatz has taught at various universities in Argentina and Germany. In 2018, she received a residency grant from the Ikusmira Berriak program for the Tabakalera Cultural Center in San Sebastián, Spain. In 2020, she was a fellow at Villa Aurora in Los Angeles, USA.
In October 2022, Wohlatz began shooting the feature film "Sleep With Your Eyes Open" (BR/AR/TW/DE) in Recife, Brazil, a dramaturgically experimental comedy about the experiences of a Taiwanese tourist in Brazil. The film premiered at the Berlinale 2024 in the section Encounters and won the FIPRESCI Award. It was released in German cinemas in June 2024.