Summer’s Camera Review: BFI Flare Festival 2025

It’s first love in Korean coming of age drama Summer’s Camera

Summer is a person, a season and a moment of change all at once in Summer’s Camera, the debut feature from South Korean writer/director Divine Sung. A sweet coming of age drama lit in brightly coloured honey tones, it made its world premiere at this year’s BFI Flare Film Festival in London.

Summer Han is a high school freshman when her father, a talented photographer, dies. After inheriting his old film camera with a half-used roll still loaded, Summer struggles to bring herself to use up the last few pictures. That is until school football superstar and all-round popular girl Yeonwoo catches her eye, and driven by a crush Summer snaps off the final few pictures. When she gets the film developed, she comes across a surprise.

Her father’s pictures reveal images of his own first high school love, and in setting out to track down the person in the pictures Summer seeks to better understand the man she only knew as a parent. In doing so she gains a helping hand from beyond the grave in understanding her own burgeoning feelings.

It’s an incredibly charming film that flutters with the innocent optimism and shakes with the crushing terror of that first teenage love. Sung finds the perfect balance in her dual storyline, flitting between Summer’s love for Yeonwoo and her grief for her father without ever getting too bogged down by either potentially gruelling topic.

It’s an impressively multifaceted performance from young lead actor Kim Sia, who navigates her way through all the big emotions at play with understated grace. The romance scenes are bubbly and girlish, all photobooths, nervous first kisses and Hello Kitty bedsheets – she transports us all straight back to those awkward in between years. It’s in the scenes surrounding her father that we really see this girl becoming a woman, approaching grief and the revelation of family secrets with a maturity beyond her years.

It’s all captured gorgeously by Sung and cinematographer Lee Jimin who play with pathetic fallacy to enhance a stripped back story. Stunning film photos of forests give way to dappled sunlight and summer warmed streets. All of the ‘love’ scenes are shot in a golden, hazy natural light, while moments of sadness or stress are all in stark halogen or framed by creeping darkness.

Summer’s Camera is a simple film featuring a slightly safer and more welcoming world in which a young girl is allowed to process her first love and coming out story without any hint of oppression or hatred. The plot line about the loss of her father is considerably stronger written than the actual romance, but it’s unlikely anyone will be turned off by the fluffy little story at its centre. This film doesn’t necessarily feel like it has much to say, and it’s unlikely to leave much impression after you leave the cinema. But like the fleeting feeling of summer itself – it’s lovely to bask in its glow while it’s there.

Summer’s Camera received it’s world premiere at the BFI Flare Festival London in March 2025. Wider release details TBC.