Two young Peruvian sisters are about to leave their country forever in 1992 when they unexpectedly reconnect with their absent father.
By turns stressful, joyous, generous, funny, and quietly terrifying – Queens (Reinas) honours those who “kept their feet on the ground but looked up to the sky.” The people who wanted a better and safer life for their kids. Those who loved Peru but could not risk staying – and those who risked everything by staying.
Queens explores doing the best thing for the people you love by realising that means letting them come to terms with what they must in their own way if not in their own time.
Nadine Whitney talks to director and co-screenwriter Klaudia Reynicke about her beautiful film selected by Switzerland as the choice for the 2024 Academy Awards.
What drew you to the early nineties and the political situation in Lima? Can you tell me about recreating 1992 through music, dialogue, cultural, and pop culture references?
Klaudia Reynicke: I left Peru when I was ten but went back once a year with my mom to visit our remaining family until I was about fourteen or fifteen years old. After that, most of our close relatives also left the country, mainly for the USA. My mother and I lived in Switzerland, so we started going to the US and we stopped going to Peru.
With Queens, I wanted to reconnect with my country, my youth, but also create a story about a family in my city, Lima, and to be honest this was the only Peru I knew, the one I left when I was a kid. By returning to Peru shooting the film and working with local people, I now feel I know a bit better Peru from an adult perspective. But that wasn’t the case before shooting the film. As a writer and director, I need to understand my subject perfectly. I don’t think I would have wanted to make such an intimate film about today’s Peru without first living the experience.
The music is a combination of the songs from my youth in the ‘90s, some contemporary music, such as the French band “La Femme,”, and some pieces I co-composed with Gioacchino Balistreri. It was important to treat the music like another character, not limited to ‘90s songs but reflecting the Peru’s rich and varied musical landscape, spanning older traditions, and iconic tracks from the ‘80s and the ‘90s.
Queens uses one family to tell a larger story. Tita (María Elena the grandmother), Elena, Aurora, and Lucia are representing an upper to middle middle class. María Elena has Wilma as a housekeeper. She forgets sometimes that she’s asking Wilma to help and endangering her during curfew. Carlos has had some education but he’s now hiding his financial and social struggles. Jorge is political.
Can you tell me about using one extended family as a cross section of Peruvian society at the time?
KR: It was important to me to show the story through different perspectives, to echo the context. We see the world through the eyes of Lucia who is ten and Aurora who is fourteen. There is a big difference between their “wants and needs.” We also see through the perspective of the parents, who each face their own struggles.
Elena (Jimena Lindo) is building a future elsewhere, away from the chaos of her country, while Carlos (Gonzalo Molina) is trying to survive the crisis and leave a trace on his daughters who will leave soon. Carlos is a mirror of his country, a broken society. The rest of the extended family also help us to understand the wider context. For example, the grandmother’s (Susi Sánchez) classist attitude toward the housekeeper reflects common middle-class behaviour in many parts of South America. Jorge opposes the far-right government, the upcoming dictatorship that took over after 1992, and suffers the consequences.
I think it was important to me to describe the complexity of the context, as a kid I don’t remember being truly scared. I was raised in the chaos, so it was all normal to me, but it wasn’t for the adults who saw the changes in only a few years. Which is why, it was important to describe the country as wounded, but where it is also people still trying to live normal lives. It is shown by their parties and gatherings. I also needed to show the limits of life in Lima: when the two girls go out during curfew and they are caught by the military police, reminding us that true normalcy is fragile. I sometimes wonder if in a broken society, people, civilians often feel a silent duty to stand together, no matter how hard they try to pretend everything is fine. Because this is what I felt on looking back at my youth.
The young actors who play Aurora (Luana Vega) and Lucia (Abril Gjurinovic) have not appeared in a feature film before. How did you work with them to get textured and authentic performances?
There isn’t a real cinema industry in Peru—mostly commercials, soap operas, TV shows, and occasionally a few series are produced. Finding children for the film in this environment was difficult because those who are already involved in the local industry (one more aligned with TV and commercials rather than arthouse films) tend to have an “imprint of recitation” I find hard to remove as a director. It’s possible with adult actors, but with kids, it’s very challenging.
All the kids I was watching from the casting videos had previously worked on some TV or commercial productions. So, I asked the casting managers to go out and look for girls on the streets. Casting found Lucia (Abril Gjurinovic) at a shopping mall with her dad. When I saw her perform, I knew I had found her. The realism and authenticity of Abril’s performance were truly breathtaking. Later, I learned that Abril and her mom no longer lived in Peru, but in Belgium, separated from her father, who was divorced from her mother. I think Abril was able to identify closely with Lucia’s story, as they had much in common. Only Abril knew what Lucia’s future would be like.
I found Aurora through our Peruvian co-producer, Daniel Vega. Luana Vega is his daughter, and she caught my eye one day passing behind him when we were on a Zoom call. Luana is an exceptional young lady, very talented and intelligent, it was very easy to work with both of them.
You use ‘tableaux’ as visual language. Scenes in front of Mercita’s mirror are repeated. Tita and Lucia. Lucia and Gloria. Family dinner scenes at Tita’s table. Tita’s living room. The police station. Tita’s bathroom. The relationships between the characters and their struggles to communicate what they want and need play out in cars. Can you tell me about creating the visual language of the film.
KR: I worked closely with Queens’ director of photography Diego Romero Suarez. This is our third collaboration as we’ve already made another feature Love Me Tender (2019) and worked together on a series La vie devant (2022), so we know each other well, we get along, and very importantly, we share similar tastes.
When defining the texture and visual of a film, our inspiration doesn’t come only from cinema. First, and of course, we consider how we want to tell the specific story, this one was set in the ‘90s, but we wanted to get away from that ‘90s overdone look. We look for ideas in different sources, cinema and photography.
For Queens, we drew inspiration from photographs by William Eggleston and Joseph Szabo. I love playing with light and shadow, so we paid special attention to the night scenes. We were drawn to the reflections of candlelight during blackouts. A candle’s flame is alive, dancing in unpredictable and somewhat non-linear in its manner, creating an atmosphere no other light can match. We loved it and tried to do it as much as we could.
Both Diego and I come from a documentary background, and we enjoy working with unpredictable elements and being surprised, so we try to stay flexible. But of course, we didn’t want to shoot Queens as if it were a documentary, it didn’t make any sense to us. Instead, we often talked about creating “tableaux”, or “tableaux vivants” in which the actors bring life to each frame.
Carlos ‘El loco’ is unreliable, a compulsive liar, an absentee father. But he genuinely does want to connect with his daughters in those last few weeks. Even Elena has hope he will eventually do the right thing. Can you tell me about co-scripting his character?
KR: Carlos reflects a country in turmoil, a man struggling to survive in a broken, “no futur” but also “machista” society. He is unable to provide financially for his daughters, he doesn’t have a home, he has different small jobs, and he feels like a failure preferring to hide rather than spend time with his kids.
In Queens, we meet Carlos at a pivotal moment: when he learns his daughters are leaving forever. He believes the only way to earn their acceptance and their love, to leave a trace, is to become someone else, an “interesting” version of himself. With Diego Vega, my co-writer in Queens, we would talk for hours before starting to write. We talked about people we knew, people we heard of, and we have encountered many men like Carlos. I think everyone knows a ‘Carlos’ in their life.
I didn’t grow up with my biological father who left for the USA when I was six. I feel he hid in a similar way to Carlos, and to me, that was also an inspiration.
Lucia is the observer. Naïve and knowing simultaneously. She adores Aurora and trusts her. She also wants to trust Carlos. She believes in Tita’s ghost. She loves Elena. Would you call her your point of view character?
KR: Although we often follow Lucia’s perspective, the point of view shifts to other characters as well. We’re not always with her, but her innocence and her simple need for love and care make it probably easier for viewers to feel close to her. As the film has traveled to different festivals and theatres, I’ve interacted with a wide range of viewers. Such interactions continually revealed new insights into the characters. For example, many men and fathers have connected strongly with Carlos, which I didn’t anticipate, because he is such an imperfect figure. And the film isn’t strictly from his viewpoint, it never was, not even in the script, but we do follow him to his workplace and witness his sense of powerlessness as a father and as a citizen. I believe this has led some viewers to see Carlos as the main, or at least, the emotional protagonist of the story.
Others focus on Aurora, but always in relation to Lucia. In contrast to Lucia’s fundamental desire for love and care, Aurora wants to remain in Peru to stay close to her friends and boyfriend, but she is the the “kids clan” not the adult one. This contrast makes some viewers view both sisters together as central protagonists, through their shared perspective.
Still others perceive the entire family as a kind of ensemble character—a “choral” arrangement—where the point of view shifts among them as a collective. In the writing, we started with the kids POV, but with more versions this shifted. When filming, I did give more weight to the others characters too.
Queens shows how much joy there is in Peru. The sense of community with the ‘trade economy’. How Elena needs to leave because of factional violence and economic breakdown. But none of the family hate their culture. They are victims of systems. Can you tell me about creating joyful moments in a period of crisis?
KR: It’s part of being in a place where there is a social and political crisis. Peruvians cherish their culture and traditions; we are very proud about them. I’ve never stopped telling people I was Peruvian before anything else even thought I left Peru when I was still a child.
Elena’s difficulties to leave everything she loves behind highlights that feeling, it’s not easy. I wanted to show what she was walking away from, both the good and the bad. I love my country, but like many other countries in Latin America, circumstances can deteriorate rapidly, change can happen within a matter of months, much as we’ve seen today in Venezuela or Argentina.
Yet that doesn’t mean people suddenly despise where they’re from. It’s far more complicated than that, and portraying that complexity was essential in Queens.
Why would you like audiences to see the film?
KR: I want people to feel the difficulty of leaving a country forever and understand how it changes a family and each one of its members. But I also wanted to show hope in such a dramatic situation. Yes, a family might be separated, but the intensity of knowing this can bring them closer in a way they wouldn’t have been otherwise. Emigration in this film, or at least the concept of it - as Carlos knows his daughter will be leaving for good - is what will make this family (that wasn’t a family anymore) reunite.