The Summer of Love. Fraser Kershaw’s Radiant Ode to Connection

In Fraser Kershaw’s The Summer of Love, unveiled at the Roma Short Film Festival in 2025, cinema becomes a prism, refracting the fleeting hues of human connection into a luminous reverie. This live cinema project, a delicate weave of glances, silences, and whispered eternities, is less a film than a pulse—a visual sonnet that hums with the ache of universal longing. Kershaw, an alchemist of emotion, transforms the modest canvas of an American college town into a borderless dreamscape, where love transcends time and place, lingering like the last light of summer. In an exclusive interview with Roma Cinephilia Magazine, Kershaw opens up about the heart and craft behind this cinematic gem, which has garnered 50 festival selections and 12 seperate wins by July 2025.

The film’s essence is not a linear story but a cascade of moments, where two unnamed souls—raw, unguarded, and achingly familiar—dance across time’s fragile edges. “It was more of a feeling,” Kershaw reflects when asked about his inspiration for this cinematic poem. “Stitching it together became the dance.” This approach, intuitive yet deliberate, allows the film to unfold like memories plucked from the air, each vignette a brushstroke of tender gestures and quiet breaths. From a hand brushing another to a tree’s shadow swaying, Kershaw’s camera—once a borrowed HD shoulder model, now a cinema rig—captures intimacy with a lover’s gaze, rendering the abstract achingly real.

Natural light is the film’s silent muse. “I have faith in the light,” Kershaw says. “It gave us everything we needed, in perfect rhythm and time.” Guided by dawn’s promise and dusk’s golden ache, he sculpted each frame to glow with an ethereal warmth, transforming everyday settings into a visual symphony. The American college town, infused with whispers of Latin America and echoes of Caribbean serenity, becomes a world where love knows no map. Kershaw, alongside his first film collaborator Carlos, drew from personal memories to craft this borderless dreamscape. “Carlos and I have safe of locations and grew up in these exact spots and hidden locations,” he shares. “Walking back into these spots was like second nature, like all the things we experienced from youth were not there anymore, like it was all a dream and here we are still sitting in the same spot of our youth.”

(Film The Summer of Love: ‘Breaking dawn into day’, Roma Short Film Festival, Roma, Italia)

(Director Fraser Kershaw and Producer Carlos Marshall in their youth, Pennsylvania, USA)

The film’s aesthetic, born of resourcefulness, carries a timeless quality. Kershaw recalls the early days of using one of the first HD shoulder cameras and accessing “unlimited wardrobes” to shape the film’s look. “These days we use a cinema camera,” he notes, “and yes, when we had our first suits, we walked the streets.” This evolution from gritty ingenuity to refined artistry mirrors the film’s own journey—a blend of raw authenticity and polished poetry. Quick cuts pulse like heartbeats, while long takes cradle unspoken truths, creating a rhythm that invites viewers to feel rather than follow. “It wasn’t on purpose, until you discover it on purpose,” Kershaw explains of this experimental flow. “It seemed to be a process, then it came very quickly where it was seamless.”

With 50 festival selections and 12 awards, The Summer of Love has become a beacon on the world cinema festival showcasing here in Rome. “The world still loves uncommercial moving images on a big screen,” Kershaw observes, reflecting on the festival journey. The film’s vignettes, personal yet universally resonant, draw from both lived and newly forged memories. “Yes, 100%,” Kershaw has not attended a proper film school but admits when asked about academic influences Kershaw said he was a film professor for a semester in California and said a useful professor today would group a team, throw them a camera and a sound kit and have them return on the last and share.” Kershaw is adamant: “But the film in Italy today, that you see are a collection of old and new memories made as we began the process. Blended.” This fusion of past and present imbues the film with a timeless intimacy, inviting viewers to see their own stories in its original glow here in Roma. Kershaw says he is a big fan of the food in Italia and will be on location for Italian cinema in the fall of 2025.

(Fraser Kershaw, briefly a film professor in Southern California, USA)

The dialogue, sparse yet searing, falls like petals. Lines conclude the theme “Love transcends into eternity, even beneath the tree’s standing still in the center of everything” allows a poetic weight that resonates deeply with the Italia. When asked about crafting such lines, Kershaw is modest: “Not sure that’s how it was portrayed, but it may have that feeling.” This understated approach extends to his direction, where authenticity reigns. “Live Cinema. I wanted nothing canned and overdirected,” he says, emphasizing his commitment to capturing unfiltered emotion. The unknown people, described as vessels of feeling, deliver performances that carry the weight of lifetimes within generations, their glances and silences making the abs tract viscerally real.

(Fraser Kershaw Stitching Film (Pre-Roma) 

For Italians watching The Summer of Love in Roma, Kershaw hopes they carry a simple yet profound truth: “That Italy still carries the best place on earth to fall in love.” This sentiment, echoed in the film’s radiant ode to connection, speaks to its universal appeal. Not for those who seek tidy resolutions, The Summer of Love is a gift for movie dreamers which is a fleeting, luminous meditation that lingers like a summer sunset, whispering of love’s eternal dance.

The Summer of Love is a soul-stirring triumph, a testament to Fraser Kershaw’s poetic vision and a must-see for those who chase cinema’s heart. 

(Fraser Kershaw Creation Studio, Calilfornia, USA)