Talking About the Weather

For her mother's birthday, Clara, a PhD student in philosophy, travels from Berlin to the Mecklenburg province. A social study about home and its influence, post-reunification traumas and milieus from which one can emancipate oneself but never completely overcome.

The weather forecast for the next few days, choosing the right cake for your mother’s 60th birthday or Hegel's concept of freedom? You can never completely leave your own origins and influences behind. Clara realizes this when she returns home to Mecklenburg for her mother's birthday. Clara has settled well into her Berlin city life: a spacious shared flat in Kreuzberg, academic ambitions and a PhD program in philosophy, a teenage daughter who is growing up with her father. Clara's (seemingly) self-determined life in the big city clashes with the (seeming) narrowness of the East German province from which she thought she had escaped. But it's not quite that simple. With a precise grasp of the respective milieus, director Annika Pinske first depicts everyday university life between temporary jobs and academic relationships before Clara sets off on a journey to her family in the countryside and into her own past; a smart social drama about changing images of home.

Image © Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin (dffb)