Kelly Marie Tran Boards Carlos López Estrada’s Spoken-Word Poetry Pic ‘Summertime’ As EP

EXCLUSIVE: Kelly Marie Tran has come aboard as an executive producer on Summertime, reuniting her with her Raya and the Last Dragon director Carlos López Estrada on his spoken-word poetry feature film that world premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Good Deed Entertainment has distribution rights to the pic, which will now get a July 9 release date in select Los Angeles and New York movie theaters before expanding a week later.

Inspired after attending a spoken-word workshop featuring 20-plus high school performers from the Los Angeles-based nonprofit Get Lit, Estrada proposed a collaboration to develop the performers’ work into a loose, interconnected narrative, allowing the young poets to express themselves and their relationship to the city in an authentic way onscreen. The result is the Slacker-esque construction Summertime, part contemporary musical, part sociological art, that bowed at Sundance in its experimental NEXT section.

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Kimberly Stuckwisch, Jeffrey Soros, Alisa Tager, Simon Horsman, Estrada and Diane Luby Lane are producers.

“Watching Summertime was like falling in love for the first time. It’s a love letter to Los Angeles and to the many incredible artists and individuals living in it,” said Tran. “I can’t wait for audiences to fall in love with these incredible poets — fully, completely, and inexplicably — the way I did.”

Added Good Deed founder and CEO Scott Donley: “Kelly’s passion for these incredible young artists is contagious, and we’re thrilled she was just as touched by their stories and poetry as we were. We’re especially excited by her commitment to learn how to write her own poetry by attending a Get Lit workshop herself.”

Here’s Tran announcing her involvement with the film (though not in iambic pentameter).

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