Getting down towards the tail end of this year’s Sundance Film Festival, I had started to hear the buzz grow for a film I hadn’t seen yet. Alessandra Lacorazza’s In the Summers was on the tip of everyone’s tongue. The film impressed so greatly that it won both the Grand Jury Prize for Drama and the Directing Award. I had to see it, and also come away impressed by this deeply moving story of two girls coming to grips with the troubled, estranged father they only see during the summer months.
The film features a breakout performance by Puerto Rican rapper Residente, who holds his own opposite The Flash star Sasha Calle and powerful Mutt actor Lío Mehiel. Lacorazza’s semiautobiographical account follows sisters Eva and Violeta as they grow and change over the years (the characters are recast multiple times throughout), learning more about their estranged father Vicente as they spend the summer months with him in Las Cruces, New Mexico.
What I loved about the film is how Lacorazza creates these snapshots, moments of time in the trio’s lives. We never see them outside of Las Cruces, but with each visit they are different people, sometimes they have grown closer, sometimes further apart. There’s no judgment in any of it, even as Vincente proves time and time again what a self-destructive force he can be. You can read my review here.
SYNOPSIS: Siblings Violeta and Eva live in California with their mother, but every summer they travel to Las Cruces, New Mexico, to spend time with their loving but unpredictable father, Vicente (René “Residente” Pérez Joglar). Over the course of four formative summers that span adolescence to early adulthood, Violeta and Eva learn to appreciate their father as a person, his flaws and limitations inseparable from his passion and tenderness. Lovers come and go, the backyard goes to seed, but the idea of home remains knotty and elusive. This powerful and deeply personal directorial debut from Alessandra Lacorazza offers a nuanced study of young people questioning their place within their families, their communities, and their identities. Winner of the US Dramatic Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, In The Summers proves both an emotional capsule of growing up within a fragmented family and a love letter to the resilience needed to survive.
In the Summers opens in select theaters on September 20th.
