In 2011, Klaudia Reynicke was invited to participate in Berlinale Talents, the talent development program of the Berlin International Film Festival. Thirteen years later, the Peruvian filmmaker living in Switzerland returns to the competition to premiere her third feature film, Reinas, in the Generation section, dedicated to youth-themed cinema, the same section in which Carla Simón won the award for best opera in 2017. premium of the German competition for Estiu 1993.
Its first screening, yesterday Saturday, drew applause from an audience dedicated to a story with autobiographical overtones set in the turbulent Lima of the early 1990s, plagued by terrorism, the economic crisis, blackouts and curfews. The protagonists are two sisters, Aurora and Lucía, ages 14 and 10, who are about to travel with their mother to Minnesota, but first they need the signature of their father, a man who has been absent from their lives for a long time and a good deal. day reappears during the eldest daughter’s birthday.
That stranger named Carlos apologizes, arguing that he has been working “in the jungle” and tries to take advantage of the lost time with his ‘queens’ by taking them to the beach. He assures them that he is a secret agent, while to his mother-in-law, played by Susi Sánchez, he is “a starving man.”
The film had its world premiere last month at the Sundance festival, where it was received with a great reception. “It was very nice because there were a lot of Latin people. There are many Peruvians in Utah,” the filmmaker acknowledges in conversation with La Vanguardia. “I love that the film travels, that it is now being seen in Berlin and that the public enjoys this love story of a family.” Reynicke says that a great source of inspiration for the film has been the documentary Metal and Melancholy (1994), by Heddy Honigmann. “It is set at the same time in Lima and shows how many people become taxi drivers because there is no work.”
The director left Peru at the age of 10 with her mother and stepfather to Switzerland. “I have returned to my country about twice, always as a tourist, and I had that feeling of losing my identity. As time goes by, the more you need to know where you are from. And I have moved so many times, between Switzerland, the United States, Barcelona …I feel like I’m neither Swiss, Peruvian nor North American. But one day someone told me that if you have a stroke, all the languages ??you know go away and only your native language remains. I think all of those thoughts made me need to return to my roots, to a country that I left and that also left me,” he says.
And he launched into telling the story of a family that loves each other. “In all families there are problems. It is always complicated. But I wanted to be able to talk about a family that is no longer almost a family and that comes together before having to separate. I know the feelings that are in Reinas perfectly.” Reynicke confesses that his father “is a lot like Carlos. My father is very creative, a man with whom I have not lived and who is incredibly charismatic. Everyone loves him. I think he is someone a little wild,” he says, laughing. In fiction he is embodied by a friendly Gonzalo Molina. “He has love but he doesn’t know how to give it. That’s why he invents things.”
For the director, carrying out this proposal, which has a Spanish co-production from Inicia Films, has been “a very intense and very organic journey in which I wanted to be honest with my vision so that the film was authentic. Because my flaws define my cinema”. Klaudia spent four years immersed in writing the script alongside Diego Vega, another Peruvian who has been in Spain for more than two decades. Her return to Peru to begin filming took place about 15 years after—”my whole family is in the United States”—from the last time. “I was scared to death and the first two weeks in Lima were difficult. But thanks to the team I started to feel comfortable and rebuilt the Peru I had left.”
Reynicke was never afraid while living in Peru until he was 10 years old. “I was more afraid of going to Switzerland. She was terrified.” “I grew up with blackouts, and it was something very normal. At first it was a fight between the State and the terrorist groups. But when they started attacking the population in Lima, people were afraid. Especially when the economy fell. And If you could leave, you left.”
One of the great successes of the film is its successful casting. “I was dying to work with Susi Sánchez. She read the script and jumped right in.” He found Jimena Lindo and Gonzalo Molina thanks to the Peruvian casting. “Molina was very generous because he needed the public to love him like Carlos and Jimena exudes elegance and infinite patience with him.” The most complicated thing was finding the girls. They found little Abril in a shopping center and Luana is the daughter of Daniel Vega, co-producer of the film, whom she signed after seeing her on a zoom while she was talking to him. “In the end it was all magic,” he concludes happily.
