_{The Weather is Nice by Leonardo Cariglino}

In The Weather Is Nice, a man living alone and deprived (maybe even frightened) of human contact, is moved by a WhatsApp voice message left by his mother. He finally leaves his apartment to go to a FEBO snack bar, which serves its customers via a wall of small individual compartments, stacked regularly by staff inside. One of these staff members is a woman seemingly as lonely as he is. Communicating through the wall by notes, there exists, for both, the possibility of a romance…of sorts…maybe.

The Weather Is Nice is a film laced with a delicious melancholia, underlined by Leonardo Cariglino’s stylized and colour saturated mise-en-scène, even within a story that takes place at night. Our hero’s apartment block morphs almost seamlessly with the wall of tiny compartments that make up the facade of the FEBO fast food outlet, both of which indicate a strong sense of the impersonal and a total lack of human interface. Until, that is, both characters emerge into the world to discover that their lives have a new meaning…

Director Cariglino tells how the film’s melancholic undertow derives from a feeling of displacement that he has felt from birth, as a child of Italian and Greek parents growing up in Germany. He felt like a stranger in a strange land. “By having me in Germany, my parents basically deprived me of my natural habitat by birth,” he says jokingly.

“Even if you are speaking better German than them [the Germans he grew up with], there's always a connotation that you feel. And it was the same in Greece or Italy. I was always a German to them. You are always competing somehow with the expectations of heritage, and that always gives you the feeling of soul-searching and not belonging. In my work, I try to define that sometimes in a direct way, and sometimes in a symbolic, metaphorical way.”

The film was written initially over a decade ago, but during the pandemic, it hit the right metaphorical or allegorical notes. This was a story about isolation, but also about seeking contact to elevate oneself out of a depressive state. The protagonists may not know what will come of their experience, but the process will ultimately enable them to reassess their lives, even their value to others.

Apart from the two WhatsApp voice messages that book-end the film, the whole work is dialogue-free. “It's a cinema that I personally love, cinema that tells me and hides things from me, cinema by action and not by dialogue,” director Cariglino underlines. “I love to reveal character, or I love character to be revealed to me through behaviour. I really love the silences and the moments where you let the audience project their own emotions onto the characters.”

Cariglino pays compliment to his DOP (Nanko Goeting) and colour grader (Bart Voorsluis) for the look of a film that at times resembles hyper real rotoscope animation. He tells how he wanted The Weather Is Nice to resemble “an urban fairytale.” In one wistful sequence the camera enters one of the small food compartments only to emerge into the apartment of the woman who lives, opposite our hero, together with her partner. But she too is lonely or may soon be, for the tears she cries are the kind that precede a separation. “My DOP was able to create a smooth movement, like a spirit floating through her room, exposing to us a certain truth,” Cariglino says of the sequence.

For the director, the world premiere at Tribeca is perfect. A New York audience would understand better than most the sense of both isolation and hope that the film represents, he believes, given how hard the city was hit by the pandemic. “This film for me is a hug to the world to say, this is stuff that has been happening [during lockdown] but stuff we have not been really looking at. I just wanted to extend this kind of understanding and was hoping I would get a certain understanding back, which I did from Tribeca.”

Aside from The Weather Is Nice, Cariglino is in pre-production on his first feature, Convert, which he describes as a “coming-of age myth.” The film, produced by East End Films and supported by MFG Film and broadcaster SWR, will be shot in Germany in May 2024.

He also has an Italian feature, Dogs & Lizards, at advanced development stage and is seeking producers. The project won the pitch competition at the T-mobile Horizon Film Fest in Wroclaw Poland and the Daazo Pitch Award at Cannes. “I'm hoping (of course) to be able to pitch this project to Martin Scorsese in Tribeca who helped produce an Italian indie production (A Ciambra by Jonas Carpignano) about 5 years ago,” Cariglino signs off.

The Weather is Nice is produced by SODA Amsterdam.
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