Elena has accepted a job in Minnesota and plans to take her daughters from Lima. Their estranged father, Carlos, must sign the papers permitting them to leave Peru. The Sundance premiere account identifies that document as a concrete obstacle in Reinas, set in 1992. The paper does something the general language of family separation cannot: it gives Carlos a legal action to take at the moment he has begun spending time with Lucía and Aurora again. His consent would support the girls’ chance at safety while placing an ocean between them and a relationship barely restarted.
The setting gives Elena’s plan weight. Sundance’s account describes rising food costs, blackouts, a curfew and gunfire in Lima. These conditions do not make every feeling in the family easier to sort. Carlos has been absent long enough that the family knows little about his address or work; his return is therefore both welcome and unreliable. He tells extravagant stories and drives a battered car with a bag of sugar in the trunk. Those details stop him from functioning as a tidy symbol of the homeland the girls are leaving. He is a particular, uneven parent whose signature is now required.
Klaudia Reynicke says in a Sundance interview that she left Peru at ten and later wanted to return through a project that would reconnect her with the country. She calls the film semi-biographical and describes the sisters’ gradual acceptance of a biological father they scarcely know. That statement does not turn the fictional family into a transcript of Reynicke’s childhood. It clarifies the film’s interest in belonging as a process, not a passport or a sudden recognition. The young performers’ roles are especially important because the children must encounter a man whose parental status has preceded their trust in him.
One casting coincidence sharpened the director’s sense of the story. Reynicke learned after casting Abril Gjurinovic as Lucía that the young actor had moved from Peru with her mother to Belgium, leaving her father in Peru. Reynicke herself had left Peru as a child and returned to Lima to make Reinas. The film was shaped by people whose departures were different, while its fictional family still had to face the same immediate fact: Carlos could be close to the girls only briefly before the move. That short interval gives each ordinary exchange with him more weight than a grand promise.
The document cannot decide what the girls will remember. It can permit a departure, but it cannot determine whether Carlos becomes a parent to them across the distance or remains a vivid episode before the flight. Elena’s decision, Carlos’s obligation and the daughters’ developing judgment occupy the same narrow interval. Reinas finds its conflict there: leaving may be necessary, and a goodbye can still arrive before the family has learned how to be together.