To coincide with the release of Summertime, the extraordinary and original film from filmmaker Carlos Lopez Estrada, we sat down with the director and executive producer Kelly Marie Tran to find out more.
A spoken word poetry musical set in Los Angeles, following the intersecting stories of 27 young Angelinos over the course of a single day, the film was developed over a Summer workshop with these 27 youth poets, all of whom served as co-writers and stars. Estrada tells us about how he came across the workshops and why the seemingly endless amount of poems and stories compelled him to come up with a film concept that would be unlike anything else we have seen.
He also spoke to us about making the film, how they decided which poems would follow each other and how that decided the structure of the film. Coming on as executive producer after they had worked on Raya and The Last Dragon together, Kelly Marie Tran told us about the first time she saw the film and fell in love with it, and how she immediately wanted to be involved and help get the film seen by as many people as possible.
You can watch the full interview below:
Summertime opens on July 9th in the US.
