Winner of the U.S. Dramatic Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, In the Summers is a brilliant portrayal of resilience and survival that follows siblings Violeta and Eva. They live in California with their mother, but every summer travel to Las Cruces, New Mexico, to spend time with their loving but unpredictable father, Vicente. Over the course of four formative summers that span adolescence to early adulthood, Violeta and Eva learn to appreciate their father as a person.
Lovia Gyarkye of the Hollywood Reporter wrote that “the feature is a visual poem, an enveloping four-stanza ode to experiences shared by a man and his daughters.”
“These understated scenes of familial intimacy introduce Lacorazza Samudio as a director with a deft hand for crafting character development from lived-in behavior rather than dialogue…In the Summers is the type of personal, confidently executed first outing that should hopefully put the filmmaker on an auspicious track to produce other keenly humanist work.” ~ Carlos Aguilar, Variety
“The most impressive work belongs to that of Residente, a Puerto Rican rapper otherwise known as René Pérez Joglar. As [Vicente], Residente avoids the pitfalls of playing bad fathers… Residente finds the subtlety in his flaws…Because of this attention to the environment that shapes these hot days, In the Summers is brimming full of its characters’ internal aches rendered elegantly across time.” ~ Esther Zuckerman, IndieWire
In the Summers actor Sasha Calle will participate in a Q&As at the Royal on Friday, September 20.
Writer-director Alessandra Lacorazza Samudio’s statement:
“My father was a brilliant and beautiful man. Maybe the smartest person I’ve ever known. He had a love of science he wanted to share, even when his audience wasn’t eager. I knew he was prone to anger and drinking and probably drugs. But there was a lot I didn’t understand until he died.
“I was in a bad car accident with my father and sister when I was young, one where I was severely injured and suffered traumatic brain trauma. What I thought happened was there was a car accident, an ambulance came, and we were taken to the nearest hospital, and eventually we recovered. What I found out after his death, was that he had to drag our bodies from the wreckage and walk down a deserted road until someone stopped to help him. That realization took the car accident, which I have always thought of as my trauma, and made me realize it was also his trauma. Our shared trauma. It made me realize there was a deeper complexity to my father. A deeply wounded, chaotic, man raised me but he also had a deep love for his daughters.
“And so I started the long process of creating In the Summers. My aim was to explore this human who, for better or worse, was the root of so much of me. During this process I kept asking, can we make amends? For our missteps, our words, our actions? Or will they forever define us? The closer I get to finishing this film the more I realize that the issue is with the question. Life is far more complex.
“In the Summers explores Latine identity through its characters and how it intersects with fatherhood, addiction, trauma, sexuality and access to opportunity. It’s a story of how we survive our parents, and the beauty of that survival. This is a personal film for me not only because it is inspired by my life but because I want to see complex Latine and Queer characters shown in an honest way. Thank you for considering this project and having the opportunity to tell my story.”