The calendar is the formal pressure in Alessandra Lacorazza’s In the Summers. Sisters Violeta and Eva spend successive summers with their father Vicente in Las Cruces, New Mexico. The writer-director’s Sundance interview links the fictional work to questions from her childhood, while the film’s own family remains distinct from hers. The recurring visit gives the audience an interval rather than continuous access. Children change substantially between one summer and the next; a parent who sees them intermittently may imagine a continuity they no longer feel.
Vicente is described as loving and unreliable. Those qualities are often arranged as alternatives in stories about fathers: affection is invoked to excuse failure, or failure is used to deny affection. A repeated summer structure can hold both at once. Each return creates an opportunity for renewed closeness and a test of whether a promise from the last visit has survived. The daughters’ growth makes the consequences cumulative. They are not simply learning the same lesson year after year; they bring new capacities and expectations to an old address.
Sundance’s premiere account identifies René Pérez Joglar in his first acting role as Vicente and presents the family relationship as a rite of passage. Casting a musician recognizable under another public identity could pull attention toward the father, but the film’s time scheme keeps the sisters essential. They are the moving measure. Vicente may stay in the same house while his daughters age beyond the versions of them he remembers. That asymmetry is a precise way to portray the cost of an interrupted parent-child relationship without claiming every interruption looks alike.
The summers in the title are plural, and the spaces between them do narrative work. A conventional reunion story might ask whether one emotional visit repairs everything. This premise asks what repair would mean if each visit is followed by another separation. It also avoids reducing the children to judges of a parent. They must make lives elsewhere, with a relationship to Vicente that changes as their own sense of self develops. Lacorazza’s frame allows time to be evidence: not proof of a single betrayal, but a record of accumulated hope, disappointment and adaptation that no one encounter can settle.
A visit can contain wonderful hours and still leave a child uncertain about the next month. The film’s recurring structure makes that difference legible. It does not require Vicente to be cruel for his unreliability to matter, nor does it require the daughters to stop loving him in order to notice a pattern. Time supplies the comparison they cannot avoid making.