Summer is a season that sinks its teeth into you.
You are in constant anticipation for the heat: you spend half the year yearning for that sun-on-your-skin warmth, and days so long they stretch towards midnight. When else can you imagine rooftop parties and heady beach days and meeting strangers who end up as friends?
The heightened tension of a heatwave is the perfect companion to a slow burn. Fast and slow run in parallel – the pace of romance or intimacy trying to keep up with the season that always threatens to leave you. Then there’s the need for deliberate pause or habitual punctuations, just so you can catch your breath.
It’s a feeling so often captured in European cinema – the films of Eric Rohmer, Mia Hansen-Løve and Luca Guadagnino. Young love, long summers, unexpected events; all stirred up by the heat of the sun.
When we were thinking about Jalapeño Ginger, we kept returning to this dizzying, sun-soaked energy. The sun, the heat, the cicadas, lime juice dripping down your arm, flakes of salt scattered on terracotta, the remnant of deep yellow aperitifs swirling at the bottom of glasses dripping with icy condensation.
So where better to explore this than at the foot of Mount Etna? Casa Lawa is an explosion of colour and joy. The chaos of life is never-ending, and this trip was about taking all that frenetic energy and converting it into something that reminds our protagonists of who they really are. They’ve all gone through their own types of struggles and victories; looking up at Mount Etna, a volcano in constant activity, they’re reminded of the bubbling creativity and joy that can erupt when you’re around people who bring the heat.
