I am in this picture and I do not like it. I AM IN THIS PICTURE AND I DO NOT LIKE IT. (I love it) 

I stopped living with my dad when I was 13. He lost custody of my sisters a year and a half later. Before that, it was a volatile blur of some of the most fun and most frightening pieces of my childhood. I think a lot about the last handful of times I saw him before he died a lot now that I’m in my late-20s and have the space to look back on those years with sharper clarity and more grace. My dad fucked me up, but I’m also the version of myself that…

Sundance 2024
Two sisters spend their summers with their father Vincente at his home in Las Cruces, New Mexico while they spend the rest of the year in California. The film spans from the girls’ childhood to young adulthood, but only glimpsed in vignettes of various summers with their father. It captures the messiness of parent-child relationships which I’m sure gets exacerbated by 9-10 month absences.  At times, the girls have their father on a pedestal, other times they’re completely let down by him. The truth in almost every case is that when we reach adulthood we see our parents with a very different lens than we had growing up. At some point we find acceptance of the fact that…

Vicente is a struggling father with a deep sense of failure. We first see him dealing with a broken marriage and a fractured family. We learn that he comes from the struggles of an immigrant background. He has a knack for and an appreciation of intellectual life and teaching, but he never fully pursues either. To a degree, his failure becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy — his sense of inadequacy emotionally derails his efforts at good parenting and returning to school, leading instead to alcoholism and recklessness. It’s a painful cycle of ups and downs: his quests and trips in search of the extraordinary and poetic alternate with angry outbursts and conflicts with his children.

His relationship with Violeta is marked…

I really enjoyed this one. It's not told from the problematic father's perspective, but his timeline. We don't see his two daughters grow up, their daily lives, we don't even see the aftermath of certain tragedies. They just show up once a year a little older, a little wiser, and with more agency. As adults they can control their own exposure to him as opposed to be being subjected to it as children. All of the acting here is phenomenal from every iteration of the daughters to the father, played by Residente, who creates a high level of chaos and animosity around his children, but we can always see the pain in his eyes, the regret, the desire for a…

Oh, the hollow sad ache in my chest when this one ended. It’s thoughtfully scripted by director Alessandra Lacorazza, and the four-act structure reinforces the fragmented bonds between two sisters and their long-distance father, Vincente. 

He’s full of love, good intentions, rage, regret, cruelty, and egotism. Certain of his actions could be unforgivable, but as played by René Pérez Joglar, he remains a pained, addicted human. It’s an astounding performance. Only after it ended did I check for his other credits, and they’re all music videos except for a Disney comedy where he played “Tattoo Artist.” He’s rapper Residente essentially making his acting debut, which makes his work here not just nuanced and devastating but phenomenal. 

The daughters are sensitively…