For the background to his feature début, Charles Teton quotes the words of Martin Scorsese about John Cassavetes: ‘When you say just pick up a camera and shoot a movie, you have to understand that means you’re crazy. When you pick up that camera and look through it and start shooting, something happens like a drug and you’ve got to keep going and you start borrowing money, begging till you have your movie.’ In 1987 Teton conceived Dark Summer and started, entirely independently, to make it. The film was produced, shot and edited in Liverpool, with an incredibly dedicated cast and crew.Dark Summer became a study of innocence and naïvety; a summer filled with struggle and success, love and death. The two protagonists, Jes and Abraham, personify many conceivable opposites, such as darkness and light, roughness and warmth.The raw city of Liverpool also plays a major role in this story filmed like a documentary.
