Spike Lee will be presenting a new film at the Sundance Film Festival known as Red Hook Summer. As I’ve said countless times the director is essential to American cinema whether you like him and his films or not. In some ways I’d say he was a greatly underrated filmmaker. Some can’t seem to get past the firebrand politics and ‘fuck you’ gestures. I saw Lee speak at a BFI event a couple of years ago and far from being a super-serious type, he was bloody hilarious and even did an impersonation of Michael Jackson’s real speaking voice (a deep tone, apparently).

After that digression, there’s now a plot synopsis and a couple of images online for Red Hook Summer obtained via Sundance’s website and you can read what the movie is all about and get a look at the lead characters. The film stars Clarke Peters, Jules Brown, Toni Lysaith, Nate Parker, James Ransone, Thomas Jefferson Byrd.

Hopefully it’ll play UK festivals in 2012 or even get released. The Sundance film festival runs from 19th – 29th January.

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, 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.

Source: Collider