“Best Summer Ever,” a teen musical from directors Lauren Smitelli and Michael Parks Randa, has nabbed distribution. Freestyle Digital Media will release the film — which was selected for SXSW 2020 prior to the pandemic and screened at the fest this year — on North American digital and VOD platforms and DVD April 27. A press release announced the news.
Featuring “eight original songs and a fully integrated cast and crew of people with and without disabilities,” “Best Summer Ever” follows Sage (Shannon DeVido) and Anthony (Ricky Wilson Jr.), who “upon meeting and falling in love at a dance camp over summer break, think they won’t see each other again until the following summer,” per the source. “However, Sage, by a twist of fate, arrives unexpectedly at the same high school as Anthony. Now faced with the drama of high school cliques, an evil cheerleader, and the illegal secret that keeps Sage’s family on the move, they are forced to reevaluate their relationship as Tony struggles to be both the high school football star and the dancer he’s always wanted to be.”
Maggie Gyllenhaal is among the supporting cast and executive produces alongside Mary Steenburgen, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Amy Brenneman. Smitelli and Randa penned the script with Terra Mackintosh, Will Halby, and Andrew Pilkington.
According to research from the Inclusion Initiative, only 2.3 percent of characters across the 100 top movies of 2019 were depicted with a disability.
“[‘Best Summer Ever’ was] made by one of my favorite collectives on the planet — Zeno Mountain Farm, which is a place that nurtures community between people with and without disabilities,” Smitelli told us. “More than half of our cast and crew are people with disabilities. With such a lack of representation in the industry, it became a momentous feat that we made our movie this way, but Zeno has been doing this for years; this is simply the first feature length endeavor.”
The filmmaker explained, “I was interested in showing characters on screen that have disabilities without having that ever become part of the story. To me, it’s so important to have equal representation, and I’ve hardly seen disabled characters in stories that don’t revolve around their disability.”
Shorts such as “Visual Description” and “Marathon” and an episode of “Disengaged” are among Smitelli’s other credits.
Check out the trailer for “Best Summer Ever” below.
