In the Summers

This tricky but not tricksy feature debut for writer/director Alessandra Lacorazza Samudio is a lightly dramatised account of the summers spent with her sister visiting her dad in New Mexico. Tricky because it’s a film about a lack rather than a presence, a failure to connect on both sides – though both dad and the kids do score points for trying. Done sometimes as snapshots, at other times as more extended scenes from a life, the story is told through the eyes of the two sisters who arrive in Las Cruces every year, to stay with dad while their mother back home in California – never seen or heard – does whatever footloose … Read more