23/01/2024 - The Swiss-Peruvian director chatted with us about the genesis of her latest feature film, the importance of re-examining memories through the filter of the present, and the evocative power of music

On the occasion of her premiere in Sundance, we met with Klaudia Reynicke who spoke passionately about her astonishing latest feature film Reinas [+see also:
film review
interview: Klaudia Reynicke
film profile], which paints a portrait as poignant and rebellious as adolescence itself, of a family gearing up to face the unknown.

Cineuropa: Where did the idea for the film come from? Was it inspired by memories from your own background?
Klaudia Reynicke: The film stems partly from a need to go back to my roots. I left Peru with my mum and my stepdad when I was ten years old and then I moved around a lot afterwards, so there is a little bit of me in this film, too. I’m an only child but, just like in the film, the last time we all got together as a family in Peru I was fourteen years old. After that, the entire family moved to the USA where I lived for eight years. The inspiration behind the film comes from my own backstory, from a desire to reconnect with experiences from my childhood. After so many years abroad, and even though I’ve always spoken in Spanish with my mum, I no longer have any real links with Peru. I’ve gone back there a couple of times on holiday, as a tourist, but it’s not the same thing. In my films I always explore things I’m familiar with and, in this film in particular, I wanted to explore feelings relating to someone leaving. It’s an incredibly intense moment which I wanted to explore from various points of view: the child’s and the parents’.

Your protagonists are strong and independent women. What’s your view on this?
I think everyone will read different things into this film. I consider myself a feminist, but I didn’t write the film in these terms. Obviously, I’m a woman and I express my viewpoint as such. That said, one of the main, fundamental protagonists in the film is actually a man, Carlos, their father. The women are definitely strong, like Elena who isn’t looking to leave for love or to be saved by a man but who wants to build a better life for herself and her daughters. Elena is pragmatic, she’s found a job abroad, she’s studied, she speaks a variety of languages and that’s why she can take her daughters abroad. This might be the most feminist side of the story. I have to say, during the editing phase, I happened to show the film to a few people, almost all of them men, who said: “she’s strange, Elena; I can’t explain it, she’s so cold”. They were only saying it because she’s an independent woman, because she doesn’t care what other people think.

How do you achieve such intense dialogue between your sound and visual worlds?
My relationship with music isn’t complicated, it’s complex, in the sense that every piece is a character, in my mind. I find it quite difficult working with a composer. So, for this film I decided to use a few pre-existing pieces and, I have to say, I really enjoyed myself. I’d already chosen lots of tracks while drafting the screenplay, but others also came to me later, during the editing phase. After months of research, I still had three important scenes that I needed to find the right tracks for. So I contacted my friend Gioacchino Balistreri and asked him to work with me to create these final three pieces.

Your two young protagonists are incredible. How did you find them?
The casting process was complicated because I wasn’t there in person and none of the youngsters who auditioned really won me over. As with my other films, I prefer working with youngsters and children who don’t have previous acting experience. If they come from the world of advertising or TV, I struggle to make them fit with my own personal film language. After Covid, my casting managers went to a shopping centre where they found the smallest little girl, Abril Gjurinovic. I thought she was fantastic straight away. Then we found out that her background was really similar to our protagonist’s, Lucia, because she had also moved abroad, to Brussels with her mum. It was an idea of her that I had, rather than a face, but I could tell straight away that Abril could embody this idea. As for Luana Vega, who plays Aurora, it’s a really funny story because she’s the daughter of our Peruvian co-producer Daniel Vega. She comes from a family who are 100% cinema but she’s not at all interested in working in this field and even less interested in being an actress. But with the help of her father and a friend, I managed to convince her. I was a little worried she’d get bored since she wasn’t that interested, but no, she was super professional, she radiates an incredible truth.

(Translated from Italian)