EXCLUSIVE: Coming-of-age romantic feature An Autumn Summer, starring Lukita Maxwell and Mark McKenna, has been acquired by Blue Harbor Entertainment.
Maxwell is known for appearing in Apple TV series Shrinking and A24’s upcoming film Backrooms. McKenna’s credits include YouTube Premium original series Wayne and film musical Sing Street.
The film tracks Kevin (played by McKenna) and Cody (Maxwell), a young couple spending their last month before going away to college in a lakeside town in Michigan.
Jared Isaac wrote and directed An Autumn Summer, which had a well-received festival run. The film will premiere in Chicago on April 23 at the Music Box Theatre. A Q&A with Isaac after the screening will be moderated by filmmaker Joe Swanberg, known for directing mumblecore titles like Hannah Takes the Stairs.
A theatrical release is planned for May 1, with a digital rollout following a month after that. The film world premiered at the Heartland Film Festival in 2024 and went on to have a well-received run on the festival circuit, collecting a number of awards and jury prizes.
Blue Harbor, which launched in 2023, is led by industry veterans Amanda Sherwin, Mike Messina and Seth Needle. The trio all held senior exec posts at Screen Media, leaving before it dissolved in 2024. Blue Harbor’s slate thus far has included character-driven indie titles like A Nice Indian Boy and Audrey’s Children, based on the life of Dr. Audrey Evans.
Isaac said of An Autumn Story, “The story is real, the place is real, and it’s a feeling I’ve wanted to bottle up and take with me wherever I am. It’s pure and uncynical, unapologetically romantic. It’s about the few individuals who stay with us forever, whether we’re conscious of it or not.”
The Blue Harbor exec team said in a statement, “We love working on discovery films like this, and our model is built to give filmmakers the support and access they need to truly be discovered by audiences.”
The film’s director of photography is Brandon Somerhalder, whose work on The Queen of Basketball won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short in 2022, and whose 2026 documentary Come See Me in the Good Light received an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Feature. An Autumn Summer is his only narrative feature to date.
The film is produced by JohnPaul Morris, Becky Boggs, Zach Aries and Isaac, and is executive produced by Joshua D. Rogers.
