For her mother's 60th birthday, Clara, a PhD student in philosophy, travels from Berlin to the Mecklenburg province – where her self-determined city life meets her family background. A sensitive social study about home and its lingering effects, 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.

Frederik Lang (20.04.2023)

Reviews and Commentary:

"The abyss that lies between these two worlds seems insurmountable. Like another, a new inner-German border. On the one hand, there is the urban educated middle class life, in which Clara has worked her way up, and on the other, the rural, proletarian environment of her childhood, in which the post-reunification period has left many gaps and ruptures. Annika Pinske has a good feel for tracing the speechlessness that has spread between the two women in concise dialogues. At one point, Clara pushes the shopping trolley through the village shop in preparation for the big party and asks: 'No, seriously, tell me three things you wish for before you turn 70. But Inge, who marches briskly and resolutely through the aisles with the shopping list, waves her off: 'Now stop asking, I want to finish here today. (...)
TALKING ABOUT THE WEATHER is an intimate portrait of two women, mother and daughter, bound by love, separated by their inability to speak to each other.” (Annett Scheffel, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 15.9.2022)

"While Annika Pinske comes from Frankfurt (Oder), Clara grew up in a village in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, but the similarities in their lives are clear. However, Pinske is not simply concerned with a juxtaposition of country and city, province and capital, East and West, even if contrasts are sometimes made abundantly clear: Here beer from plastic cups, there champagne from glasses with gold rims, here the Puhdys from the car radio, there Schumann on the piano. When she is asked what she is writing about in her doctorate, Clara replies: 'On Hegel's theory of freedom, or more precisely the concept of intersubjectivity in Hegel's conception of family and bourgeois society. What at first sounds like a parodic sideswipe at all the theses written at German universities, which are written to gather dust on the shelf never to be read again, leads to the core of TALKING ABOUT THE WEATHER.
How can different expectations be reconciled, especially as a woman, especially as an East German? In her home village, Clara is greeted like a prodigal daughter, a little pride resonates in the one who has managed to come out and make something of herself. But is that enough to make her happy? In Marcel (Max Riemelt), Clara meets an ex-boyfriend who has achieved all the classic goals of his social stratum: plant a tree, build a house, have a child. Now he's 40, runs the local pub and wonders if there's anything more to come. And so does Clara, who is driven by the desire to free herself from her seemingly small world. For the most part, she has managed to do so, but in her new world, under the university bell jar in Berlin, other constraints prevail, not fewer prejudices and clichés are cultivated than in the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern province, but only different ones." (Michael Meyns, taz, 15.9.2022)

Production Country

Germany (DE)

Production Period

2019-2022

Production Year

2022

color

color

Aspect Ratio

2:1

Duration

Feature-Length Film (61+ Min.)

Type

Feature Film

Genre

Drama

Topic

Relationship / Family, Work, Home, Science, Equal Rights / Emancipation

Available Media

DCP, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Blu-ray Disc, Digital Film

Original Version

German (de)

DCP

Subtitles

English (en), French (fr), Spanish (Latin America), Portuguese (Brazil), Arabic (ar), Chinese (zh), Russian (ru), Italian (it), Czech (cs), Japanese (ja), Romanian (ro), Mongolian (mn)

Blu-ray Disc

Subtitles

German (full), English (en), French (fr), Spanish (Latin America), Portuguese (Brazil), Arabic (ar), Chinese (zh), Russian (ru), Italian (it), Czech (cs), Japanese (ja)

DVD

Subtitles

German (partly), German (full), English (en), French (fr), Spanish (Latin America), Portuguese (Brazil), Arabic (ar), Chinese (zh), Russian (ru), Italian (it), Czech (cs), Japanese (ja)

Blu-ray Disc

Subtitles

English (en), Thai (th)

Note on the Format

Thailändische und englische UT im Bild

Digital Film

Subtitles

German (full), English (en), French (fr), Spanish (Latin America), Portuguese (Brazil), Arabic (ar), Russian (ru), Italian (it), Czech (cs), Japanese (ja), Kazakh (kk), Azerbaijani (az), Armenian (hy), Chinese (short), Mongolian (mn), Uzbek (uz)