91 - Turning 'Chaos' into a Sundance Film Festival Darling with "Summertime"

This week we bring you a remarkable story about how Carlos López Estrada, the director of the Dolby Institute Fellowship winner "Blindspotting," attended a spoken word poetry performance and was so inspired by what he saw on stage, he decided to make a wild, low-budget indie feature capturing some of the magic he witnessed that evening. With the help of Executive Producer Kelly Marie Tran, he turned a chaotic production, written and starring young poets (many of whom were only just out of high school!) into a highlight of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. 

We sat down with Carlos, Kelly, and two of the poet writers of the film, Tyris Winter and Marcus James, to discuss how they managed to make such a magical film under such wild circumstances.

"There's people [in this spoken word poetry group] from every single neighborhood in LA – as far east, as far west, south valley, everywhere in between. So you were hearing stories all about their relationship to their community, their environment, their families, LA themselves, [and all] as different as could be. But it was all young people talking about existing in the city in 2019, which put them all together into this beautiful package. And that was really sort of how the idea of what this movie could look like. We said it would be one day in LA, it would follow characters from point A to point B, and then they would pass on the torch to the next group. We would find ways for some of them to stick around, some of them would just make one-off interactions. And the only structure that this would have is that these are all young people existing in LA on the same day. And then from there on, we opened up the door for the poets, essentially told them 'you're going to write and you're going to star in your own scene. What do you want to talk about? What is important to you today?' And from then on, it was a madness."

— Carlos López Estrada, Director of "Summertime"

Be sure to go see "Summertime" in theaters while you still can. 

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