About
Who we are
Karmictale Wedding is two people: Marco Nicotra, who films, and Carlo Arcidiacono, who photographs. A filmmaker and a photographer who decided to work together instead of side by side, so that a couple's film and gallery would come from the same day, the same rooms and the same way of seeing.
We work out of eastern Sicily: Marco from Giarre, on the Ionian side of Etna, Carlo from Lentini, towards Siracusa. The couples who find us mostly come from abroad, often with a wedding planner, and almost always with a thing for cinema and good series: people who notice a frame, a cut, the way light falls in a room. We like telling their day because they will watch it the way we made it.
We never take more than one wedding a day, and we are both there in person: not a collaborator in our place, not a substitute. Marco does the editing, from the choice of the clips to every single cut; Carlo chooses and develops the photographs one by one. The music is chosen after we have seen you, because it comes from the footage, from the rhythm of the day and from who you are.
What arrives afterwards is the film, the gallery and a page of its own where the whole story sits together, to open and share with whoever was there and whoever could not be. And the cat on the logo? Her name is Nuvoletta. She lives at Marco’s place, supervises the editing, and is not allowed to come to weddings.
Film
Marco Nicotra
Filmmaker. He has been telling weddings since 2017, and photographing since 2013.
The cinema came first. At fifteen he was already more interested in how a story is shown than in the story itself, and photography was the way in: self-taught from 2013, four years of looking through a viewfinder before admitting what he really wanted was moving images, with music underneath. In 2017 he started telling weddings, and has not stopped.
On a wedding day he is not the protagonist and does not try to be. He speaks little, in a low voice, and listens a lot. He prefers natural light to anything artificial, clean geometries to clutter, and the detail in its place: the cufflinks on the piano the groom learnt on, the dress hanging on a stone wall, not on a neutral background. The sound is recorded with the same care as the image, because it is the sound that brings you back.
Then there is the edit, which is where the story is made. He watches every clip from every camera, chooses, listens to music until something fits, and builds a film that rises and falls: if it makes you cry, a moment later it makes you laugh. There is no fixed style, because the style belongs to the couple. The references, if you want them: Nolan for the way he builds empathy, Wes Anderson for symmetry and order, Lubezki for light.
Photography
Carlo Arcidiacono
Photographer. A reportage photographer since 2010, at weddings since 2015.
He started with his father's camera, as a game, and never really put it down. At university a course in humanist photography gave the game a direction; in 2010 he was photographing football for a Sicilian sports magazine, and in 2011 he joined Gerta Human Reports, a photo agency where he learnt social reportage on the field. Weddings arrived in 2015, after international workshops with Two Mann, Ivan Troyanovsky and Franck Boutonnet, and seasons spent alongside some of the best Italian wedding photographers.
The reportage never left. Solo exhibitions, from Oro e Ruggine in Catania to È Festa in Siracusa, and stories photographed in Spain, Iceland, Albania, Lampedusa and Ukraine. At a wedding he works the same way: he observes the scene, moves through it, talks to people, and presses the shutter when what he had imagined actually happens. Posed portraits are few and deliberate; the context is everything, because it is what tells you who the people are. Cartier-Bresson said photographing means putting your eye, your mind and your heart on the same line. He would sign that.
He is also the one with film in his hands: real Super 8, a cine camera, developing and scanning, and analogue portraits for those who ask. Outside weddings: the electric bass since he was fourteen, years as a live sound engineer, a family of cabinet-makers, and scouting since he was seven.