THE GUARDIAN SPECIAL ISSUE

Charles Teton's Dark Summer, which he produced and wrote as well as directed, is a first feature shot with a spare but eloquent style, mostly in Liverpool where the city's Economics Initiative Unit helped with finance. It tells the story of a young black amateur boxer (Steve Ako) who, while working as a mechanic on a scrap metal site, meets and takes up with the white daughter of the boss (Joeline Garner Joel). Dad is not best pleased and the lad is sacked. But he goes to live with the girl, gets her pregnant and attempts to start a new life with her. At the beginning of the film, we see him beaten for an area amateur championship and towards the end his first professional fight goes the wrong way too. And so gradually does their relationship. It Is almost as if fate has conspired against this simple, nice pair of innocents in a guilty world. The film accomplishes its sad tale almost as if spying on reality at various odd moments. It eschews narrative drive in favour of a slowly deepening sense of the way things often are. Only Augustus Pablo's reggae soundtrack animates it. Despite the difficulties put in front of your average patient viewer, who may well wonder why the film is so painfully slow without looking under its surface, Teton is very clearly a film-maker to watch. Whether many will watch Dark Summer is more open to question.

Derek Malcolm