The latest film from Danish director Jesper Dalgaard is an intimate, wry, and ultimately life-affirming tale of role-play and relationships set during the rehearsals for a play. Its director, a blind woman who has recently experienced the end of a relationship, leads her small cast through an exploratory search for meaning, which includes a sequence of acting exercises, costume role-plays, and highly ornate dioramas which increasingly test the limits of reality itself. Dalgaard's approach to the material is that of an author and an anthropologist; mixing fiction with hybrid documentary direction, wherein the film was allowed to evolve organically, dynamically. Talking about the film's unusual approach, Dalgaard explained that he was discovering the meaning and structure of it as they went along—learning as much from the cast as from his own notes and ideas. 

The literal concept of weltschmerz takes its name from German author Jean Paul's idea of 'world weariness,' denoting a feeling experienced by someone who believes that physical reality can never satisfy the demands of the mind. For the play's cast and director, each of whom experience some form of disability or learning difficulty, this concept acquires a new meaning—of whether people can escape the perceived 'limitations' of their differences, while also empathising with the experiences of one who is separated from themselves.

Stepping beyond the physical: an interview with Jesper Dalgaard

On naming Weltschmerz:

The title of the film came long before the cast and the final idea of the film. Nowadays Weltschmerz is seen as a ridiculous emo-term and in my opinion is widely misunderstood. I felt the original ideas expressed by Jean Paul and some of the romantic and decadent artists are reflecting an existential crisis in our times more than ever. It's of course an intellectual idea, but for me it’s also a way of approaching life; an emotional and irrational perception of life where we might need to escape the physical limitations and step beyond what we might think we know. 

On casting the film:

I was in a really toxic relationship for years and in the aftermath of that I was struggling with a broken heart. I tried all the conventional ways and nothing seemed to heal it. We were about to shoot my graduation film from The National Danish Film School and I only had 3-4 weeks to figure out what the film should be about. For a long period I was fascinated by a theatre group located in the outskirts of Copenhagen. The group only consisted of people with various learning and physical difficulties and we started a casting process where we ended up with four very different individuals that I felt could bring interesting material to the table. I started to look into these ideas about seeing them as religious figures that could guide me. I wanted to approached them as individuals that were more clever than the film. It quickly became clear to us that the blind woman was going to be the director, but we still didn’t know what the film was going to be about. We knew that we wanted to follow the process of creating a theatre piece and everything were going to take place in one location. 

On shooting Weltschmerz:

A week before we went into shooting, the film's protagonist [the Director] called me and told me that her boyfriend had left her and she was really suffering. It was one of those magical moments where everything made sense and we agreed on creating an artistic-process where we could discuss and work around the absence and presence of love. We decided not to look for an answer but keep asking questions through the five days we were shooting the film.

— Interview by Owen Gwynne Vince