Film Commission Torino Piemonte

Sea cabins seen as a fortress to secure the middle class with their achieved status, safe from the risk to appear inadequated, unable to face the new, overtook, or, in the worst case, old.
Happy Winter is a documentary intended for the cinema that reflects about the last years economic crisis and about the way the middle class is facing it.
Mondello’s carefree holiday atmosphere represents a suspension from the toils of the winter and this condition is an opportunity for me to face the subject with an ironic, fizzy and at times comical approach, but never superficially, thanks to the various interpretative levels the characters present. They have quite literally lost their shirts and lay bare their socio-existential condition, which isn’t too different from that of someone from Spain, Greece, France or North America.

Happy Winter is the début film by Giovanni Totaro, graduated at Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia of Palermo. From a cinematic point of view a register consisting of static shots, combining formal accuracy and continuously new narrative contents, will alternate with freer more visual moments associated to the sea, with camera movements and shots not always perfectly in focus representing the sea as the territory of fantasy and dreams, the element the characters retreat to from time to time.