Cold Weather
Directed by Aaron Katz
Starring: Chris Lankenau, Trieste Kelly Dunn, Raul Castillo, Robyn Rikoon
Release date: February 4, 2011 (limited)

The title of Aaron Katz‘s third feature film, Cold Weather, should not be misinterpreted as being a film about unique snowflakes, blizzards, or sub-zero temperatures, though the film’s setting in Portland does show consistent rainfall and gloomy days, evoking a distant sense of coldness and poignant beauty. It is, after all, traditional Portland weather. But Katz embraces a perspective that showcases his keen eye for finding resemblance in opposite entities. His direction here allows him to intertwine weather and humanity, making them coincide respectively. He draws comparisons from the naturalistic environment he is working in with those emotions that are running rampant within his characters. As Cold Weather is inclined to drain the life out of all plants and make living beings think twice about being out in it, Katz perceives this harsh coldness dwelling within individuals, rendering them emotionally numb and dislocated from the world they inhabit.

There is no doubt that the characters in Cold Weather desire to have their numbness relieved. They are desperately searching for any form of encouragement that has the potential of elevating them out of their current state of uneasiness. In the film’s wonderful opening credits the camera is fixated on a windowpane abundantly covered by raindrops. Slowly do the hundreds of drops cry down the window, slowly dripping away into oblivion. They are fragments looking to be engaged, for no matter how short a period of time, with other drops that would allow them to connect. An engagement is what these drops want.