“Summering” is a tender coming-of-age story that follows four best friends, Daisy (played by Lia Barnett), Dina (played by Madalen Mills), Mari (played by Eden Grace Redfield) and Lola (played by Sanai Victoria) who try to solve a mystery the last weekend before they start middle school and their lives — as they know them — change forever.
The girls find a body, and while searching for clues to figure out the man’s identity, they let their anxieties, worries and deeper feelings spill out to each other.
Director and writer James Ponsoldt and actors Lia Barnett, Lake Bell, Sarah Cooper, Ashley Madekwe, Eden Grace Redfield, Megan Mullally and Sanai Victoria sat down for interviews at TheWrap’s virtual Sundance studio to discuss the film.
Ponsoldt said the “biggest thing” that drove him to make this children-centered and driven film is the fact that he himself became a parent to three young kids.
“I really wanted to make a film where my daughter could see herself on screen, could see her relationship with her friends and dignify that experiences and everything that she feels: fear, anxiety about the future, hope, platonic love between friends,” Ponsoldt said.
Ponsoldt also says that he intentionally didn’t have a man appear in the film until much later, as most of the thrillers and crime stories he consumed growing up involved men trying to save someone, whereas women were used as “a prop to support a male narrative” or “male journey of discovery.”
“There was a real desire to tell a story that genuinely, at a deep level, was interested in the emotion, inner lives of these characters, whether they were adults, whether they were younger,” he said. “I took my views and inspiration from the women in my life — from my sister, my mother, my wife, my daughter and these amazing actors who, ultimately, by the time we were filming, knew and know so much more about the lived in experience of these characters than I ever could.”
Bell, who plays a cop in the film, says that she wanted to make a movie that helped children, especially during the pandemic.
“To help children express those more complicated neuroses or anxieties, you have to look through a different lens,” Bell said. “This is a movie — a narrative — that allows for those kinds of discussions and those kinds of feelings to be brought up without directly talking about what’s going on in our universe.”
For more commentary on “Summering,” watch the video above.
TheWrap’s Sundance Studio is presented by NFP and National Geographic Documentary Films.