Two-time Academy Award-nominated director Spike Lee has struck a deal with Variance Films to distribute his new film, Red Hook Summer, which premiered earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival.
Red Hook Summer was filmed in secrecy last summer in Brooklyn and was financed independently by Lee. The film, which will see Lee reprise his role of Mookie from his 1989 classic, Do the Right Thing, is set to be released in New York on August 10 and then to expand to select cites across the United States.
In a press release sent out by Lee, he spoke on the partnership with Variance Films, saying, “From my very first joint back in 1986, She’s Gotta Have It, I have been an independent filmmaker, and even today, I still am. I’m elated to join forces with Variance Films for the independent distribution of my new joint Red Hook Summer. We look forward to getting this film into the marketplace, where we believe 100 percent that there is a starving audience for American independent films like Red Hook Summer.”
A full synopsis for the movie is below:
When his mom deposits him at the Red Hook housing project in Brooklyn to spend the summer with the grandfather he’s never met, young Flik may as well have landed on Mars. Fresh from his cushy life in Atlanta, he’s bored and friendless, and his strict grandfather, Enoch (Clarke Peters), a firebrand preacher, is bent on getting him to accept Jesus Christ as his personal savior. Only Chazz, the feisty girl from church, provides a diversion from the drudgery. As hot summer simmers and Sunday mornings brim with Enoch’s operatic sermons, things turn anything but dull as people’s conflicting agendas collide.
Playfully ironic, heightened, yet grounded, Spike Lee’s bold new movie returns him to his roots, where lovable, larger-than-life characters form the tinderbox of a tight-knit community. A story about the coexistence of altruism and corruption, Red Hook Summer toys with expectations, seducing us with the promise of moral and spiritual transcendence. Spike is back in the ’hood.
Red Hook Summer is the Brooklyn-raised director’s 20th film and follows such Spike Lee classics as Malcolm X, He Got Game, Crooklyn and 25th Hour.
The 55 year-old director Lee will follow-up Red Hook Summer with an English-language remake of Park Chan-wook’s South Korean hit film, Oldboy.
Red Hook Summer is set for a New York debut on August 10.