IN THE SUMMERS Trailer (2024) Sasha Calle, Drama Movie

IN THE SUMMERS Trailer (2024) Sasha Calle, Drama Movie

IN THE SUMMERS Trailer (2024) Sasha Calle, Drama Movie
© 2024 - Music Box Films

Plot: What's the story about?
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.
The winner of the much-sought-after Sundance Grand Jury Prize and Sundance Director Award earlier this year, the poignant father and daughters drama “In The Summers” is finally coming out this fall. Music Box Films has set a release in September.

The directorial debut of Alessandra Lacorazza, known for a few shorts and writing and editorial work, “In The Summers,” is a touching and heartbreaking semi-autobiographical drama film that spans many years. The story is essentially about a wayward father who lives far away from his children following his divorce from his children. But his two daughters visit him in the summers at his home and New Mexico and have to navigate their love for him against his volatility and unpredictable behavior (read our review).

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The film stars René Pérez, known as the rapper Residente, Sasha Calle, known for her turn as Supergirl in “The Flash” and Lio Mehiel.

“I started developing [this story] a few years after my dad died, and it started in conversation with my sister when we were just trying to piece together our lives with my dad as we were visiting him in these chaotic ways in the summer. And the structure for it just came that way,” Lacorazza explained in a Sundance interview earlier this year. “I was like, I think this would be a really interesting way to examine a life, by just seeing these little snippets, of a father who has a lot of love but also has a lot of issues. Yes, it’s a highly personal story for me, but I think that with my cast, it also became something different and something beautiful.”

Here’s the official synopsis:

Siblings Violeta and Eva live with their mother, but every summer, they travel to New Mexico to spend time with their loving but unpredictable father in this moving drama that follows them from adolescence to adulthood.

Here’s the more expansive Sundance synopsis:

In The Summers follows sisters Violeta and Eva through their yearly summertime stays in Las Cruces, New Mexico, with their father. They share brilliant moments as Dad coaxes them to mountaintop sunrises and starry nights in deserts to teach them about the universe. Some of their other adventures are more disturbing; notably, things like a house party with Dad’s lechy friends and a perilous game of “no stopping” in his speeding car.

Music Box Films will release “In the Summers” in theaters on Friday, September 20. Watch the trailer below.

Alessandra LacorazzaIn the SummersLio MehielRené PérezResidenteSasha Calle
Sasha Calle, who made a strong impression as Supergirl in last year's DC superhero film "The Flash," steps away from the cape to portray a young woman grappling with the complex emotions of reuniting with her long-estranged father in the new dysfunctional family drama "In the Summers."

In the film, award-winning Puerto Rican rapper Residente (aka Rene Perez Joglar) stars as Vicente, a father of two young children, Violeta and Eva, who struggles to keep his family together while battling his addiction. When his demons get the best of him, a drunken Vicente destroys his relationship with his children, leading them to move to California with their mother. Years later, Vicente, now sober and remarried with a young daughter, attempts to reconnect with the now-grown Violeta and Eva. Despite their lingering resentment, they try to make an honest effort to heal in this heartfelt portrait of a family in pain but also in search of redemption.

Sasha Calle ("The Flash") and Lio Mehiel ("Mutt") star as the adult versions of Eva and Violeta, while newcomers Luciana Elisa Quinonez and Dreya Castillo play the younger versions. The cast also includes Leslie Grace ("In the Heights") and Sharlene Cruz ("Chicago P.D.").

Winner of the Grand Jury Prize for Drama and the Directing Award at this year's Sundance Film Festival, the film is written and directed by first-time feature filmmaker Alessandra Lacorazza Samudio, loosely based on her own relationship with her father.

"In the Summers" is slated to open in select theaters on September 20th. Watch the trailer, above.

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 (Rene 'Residente' Perez 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.

directed by Alessandra Lacorazza

starring Rene 'Residente' Perez Joglar, Sasha Calle, Lio Mehiel, Sharlene Cruz, Leslie Grace, Emma Ramos, Kimaya Thais Limon, Allison Salinas, Dreya Castillo, Luciana Elisa Quinonez

release date September 20, 2024 (in select theaters)
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.

Music Box Films unveiled the official trailer for In ‘The Summers’, the directorial debut film of Colombian-American filmmaker Alessandra Lacorazza. Loosely based on Lacorazza’s childhood, the coming-of-age film follows two girls over the course of four formative summers on their yearly summer visits to their father’s home in New Mexico.

‘In The Summers’ premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, where it won several awards including the top prize of U.S. Grand Jury Prize Dramatic award. The film was also screened at the 2024 Miami Film Festival and Tribeca Film Festival.

Starring in the independent film are Grammy-winning Puerto Rican rapper Residente/René Pérez, Sasha Calle, Lio Mehiel, Emma Ramos, Leslie Grace, and Sharlene Cruz.

Release Date
Directed by Alessandra Lacorazza, ‘In The Summers’ opens in US theaters on September 20, 2024.

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.

Reviews
Abe Friedtanzer in a Cinema Daily US review gave the film a B+ score, writing, “This is a story of family love that manifests in a number of sometimes productive ways, raw, honest, and quite poignant in its exploration of the evolution of relationships and the staying power of connection.”

Esther Zuckerman in an IndieWire review also praised the film, giving it a score of ‘B’, writing, “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.”

Official Trailer
Watch the official trailer for ‘In The Summers’.
A backyard swimming pool tells part of the story in Colombian American writer-director Alessandra Lacorazza Samudio’s “In the Summers.” As it goes from refreshing site of joyful congregation to an ignored eyesore in mounting disrepair, the recreational amenity establishes itself as a potently grave motif for the passage of time in this unsentimental, and yet immensely affecting debut feature about a complicated parent-children relationship. Told in four elliptical segments, it spans roughly two decades.

Grammy-winning, Puerto Rican urban music hitmaker René Pérez Joglar (better known by his stage name Residente), part of the now defunct duo Calle 13, stars as Vicente. The nonchalant dad lives alone in Las Cruces, New Mexico, a sleepy desert town with a predominantly Latino population. With a cigarette over his ear and much eagerness, he picks up his daughters Violeta and Eva (played as children by Dreya Castillo and Luciana Elisa Quinonez), in from California for summer vacation, from the minuscule local airport.

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The first chapter is built from seemingly inconsequential moments that ultimately serve as the foundation for the father’s image in his daughters’ eyes, which will slowly decay as the years move forward in the narrative. He teaches them how to play pool and cook eggs, takes them stargazing and gives in to juvenile playfulness to connect with them. 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.

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“I’m from here,” Vicente reassures his young girls when they ask about why he remains in Las Cruces. And though Puerto Rico is his actual homeland, he now resides in the house that his late mother left him — where the pool is. For Violeta and Eva, this arid locale and their father are almost inextricable from one another, as they only see him around the people and places that bring him a debilitating comfort and prevent him from evolving.

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At first his interest in them supersedes his struggle with addiction and the baggage of a failed relationship, but that caring outlook won’t last. Taking on his first substantial film performance (after making a cameo in 2009’s “Old Dogs”), Pérez Joglar, who has directed plenty of his own music videos, nails each of Vicente’s transitions with grounded ardor, from a seemingly over-confident man trying to improve himself, to the erratic outbursts that beget dangerous episodes of outright neglect, and eventually the fragility of someone coming to terms with the irreparable consequences of their shortcomings.

Lacorazza Samudio doesn’t burden her script, inspired by her own history with her father and sister, with the details of the off-screen past that brought this fragmented clan to this present. Her interest is in subtly chaotic scenes that depict recognizable personality flaws, which feel fascinatingly in contrast with the visuals. Cinematographer Alejandro Mejía’s meticulously composed frames occasionally draw our eyes to a precisely positioned horizon line, almost as if the images tried to provide the stability missing from the characters’ homelife. To announce each new chapter and time jump, the director utilizes a shot of a changing altar with objects pertinent to a particular stage of life and accompanies these tableaux with lively Latin tunes, often achieving a disorienting result.

A few years in the future, teen Violeta (a fierce Kimaya Thais), in the process of asserting her queer identity, finds support in Carmen (Emma Ramos), a lesbian bar owner and Vicente’s lifelong friend. Rockier than ever, Violeta’s interactions with Vicente feel ridden with mutual, unrelentless antagonism. For her part, adolescent Eva (Allison Salinas) sees her dad’s attention shift away from her after he has another daughter with his girlfriend Yenny (Leslie Grace from “In the Heights”) — perhaps a new chance to get things right.

The marvelous pair of actors that portray the sisters as adults in the final part, Sasha Calle ( of “The Flash”) as Eva and Lio Mehiel (the lead in Sundance 2023’s “Mutt”) playing Violeta, bring it home with two thoughtfully pained performances. However, these turns wouldn’t have the same impact without the emotional groundwork, and believable baggage, laid out by the other sets of young artists that played them earlier in the picture.

Navigating through wounds patched up and reopened, the two siblings are confronted with a bittersweet perception of their father. Each time they return to see him, there’s tension, sometimes indifference, but always a sliver of sincere affection between them, just enough to keep them coming back in hopes that they can rekindle their bond fruitfully. What’s left unsaid in this acutely moving drama, but that we can infer through Calle’s mournful gaze and Mehiel’s pitying demeanor towards Pérez Joglar‘s convincingly pathetic Vicente, is that sometimes nostalgic love alone isn’t enough to salvage what’s been repeatedly broken.

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Projects like “In the Summers” have the potential to usher in a wave of stories about Latinos in the United States that don’t hinge on an exceptional, overachieving character (compared to the multiple inspirational Latino biopics released in 2023), but that instead find their creative backbone in the everyday vicissitudes of ordinary folk. “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.

Read More About:
Alessandra Lacorazza Samudio, In the Summers, Residente, Sundance Film Festival
The indie feature In The Summers has wrapped production in New Mexico and Deadline has your first look at stars René “Residente” Pérez Joglar, in his acting debut, Sasha Calle (The Flash), Lío Mehiel (Mutt) and Leslie Grace (In The Heights) below.

Exile Content Studio, a Candle Media Company produced the project in association with Lexicon Development, alongside 1868 Studios and LUZ Films.

From writer and director Alessandra Lacorazza in her feature debut, In The Summers tells the story of Latine sisters, Violeta (Lío) and Eva (Calle), who visit their loving but reckless father Vicente (Pérez Joglar) every summer. He creates a world of wonder but under the fun facade, he battles addiction which gradually erodes the magic, culminating in a devastating tragedy. Vicente tries to make up for the past, but wounds aren’t easily healed.

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Grace portrays the character of Yenny. The character of Violeta will also be played by Dreya Renae Castillo (young) and Kimaya Thais (teen); young Eva will be played by Luciana Quinonez and as a teen by Allison Salinas. Additional casting includes Emma Ramos as Carmen; Camilla will be played by Sharlene Cruz as an adult and Gabriela Surodjawan as a teen; Indigo Montez plays Natalia.

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In The Summers– Sasha Calle and Lío Mehiel
“Alessandra is a visionary filmmaker and her script for In The Summers profoundly spoke to our mission at Exile to create content that uplifts Latin voices and tells rich, diverse stories,” said Nando Vila, Head of Exile Content Studio. “This is a powerful story, and we are thrilled to partner with Lexicon Development, 1868 Studios and LUZ Films on bringing In The Summers to life.”

“The moment I finished this screenplay I knew that it represented the kind of voice we set out to support with our mission at Lexicon,” added Alexander Dinelaris, founder, screenwriter and producer at Lexicon Development.

Academy Award-winner Alexander Dinelaris (Birdman, The Revenant) and Rob Quadrino are producing the film on behalf of Lexicon Development; Lynette Coll, Sergio Lira, and Cristobal Güell on behalf of LUZ Films. Nando Vila is executive producing the film for Exile Content Studio, alongside Richard Saperstein for Bluestone Entertainment and Henry R. Muñoz III (Weird: The Al Yankovic Story).

More exclusive images can be found below:

L to R: Dreya Renae Castillo, René “Residente” Pérez Joglar and Luciana Quiñonez

L to R: René “Residente” Pérez Joglar, Leslie Grace and Allison Salinas

L to R: Luciana Quiñonez, René “Residente” Pérez Joglar and Renae Castillo

L to R: Indigo Montez, Lío Mehiel, Sasha Calle and René “Residente” Pérez Joglar
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