In My First Summer, sixteen-year-old Claudia lives in total isolation with her eccentric mother, hidden away in a rural Australian home surrounded by fruit trees and wildflowers. When tragedy strikes and her mother dies, Claudia’s fragile, colorless world collapses—until a girl named Grace bursts into her garden like a sudden beam of sunlight.
What follows is a tender and sensory love story between two young girls—one learning to live, the other learning to feel. It’s a film about first love, freedom, and the way one summer can change the entire rhythm of your heartbeat.
My First Summer Official Trailer
Claudia has spent her entire life cut off from society. Her mother’s paranoia and pain have built invisible walls around their secluded house, leaving the girl unexposed to friendship, laughter, or the outside world. After her mother’s death, Claudia drifts through the empty rooms, trapped in grief and fear—until Grace, a bright, impulsive girl from town, appears in her garden.
Grace is everything Claudia is not: confident, lively, and full of curiosity. She sneaks into Claudia’s lonely paradise on a pink bicycle, jangling bracelets echoing in the quiet air. At first, Claudia recoils—she has never spoken to anyone outside her mother. But Grace’s warmth melts her defenses, and soon, the two begin to share an unspoken understanding.
Together they build an idyllic bubble of youth and innocence: coloring bedsheets with fruit juice, making candy necklaces and biting them off each other, drinking bitter coffee and spitting it out while giggling. For Claudia, this isn’t just friendship—it’s the first time she feels the pulse of freedom, the heat of love, and the joy of being seen.
Yet their Eden is fragile. When the outside world inevitably intrudes—police officers breaking the door, adults demanding order—their utopia shatters. Grace pleads, “I can be her guardian! I’m almost seventeen!” The moment is raw and desperate, marking the collision between adolescence and reality.
The film ends openly, without resolution—yet it doesn’t feel incomplete. The ambiguity feels true to youth itself: a summer of firsts, of sweetness and hurt, suspended forever in memory.
My First Summer Cast
Charactor
Claudia is a sixteen-year-old girl raised in isolation, naive to the outside world and haunted by her mother’s death. Through her connection with Grace, she learns to embrace emotion, trust, and the unknown.
Markella Kavenagh
Markella Kavenagh delivers a subtle, mesmerizing performance—wide-eyed and vulnerable, yet capable of sudden bursts of intensity. She later appeared in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (2022), but here, she captures something raw and unforgettable: the innocence of a soul discovering color for the first time.
Grace is impulsive, warm, and brimming with life. She’s the embodiment of teenage freedom—a girl who crashes into Claudia’s quiet existence like a wave of sunlight.
Maiah Stewardson
Maiah Stewardson brings magnetic energy to the role, balancing playfulness with emotional maturity. Her portrayal turns Grace into both savior and mirror, a symbol of the chaos and sweetness of adolescence.
Director
Katie Found
Katie Found is an Australian writer-director whose debut feature My First Summer (2020) established her as a fresh voice in queer coming-of-age cinema. Drawing on her background in theatre and visual storytelling, Found crafts lyrical narratives that explore grief, girlhood, and the fragile beauty of connection. Her filmmaking emphasizes sensory detail—sunlight, skin, sound—creating intimate worlds where emotion speaks louder than dialogue. My First Summer premiered at the Adelaide Film Festival and quickly gained cult recognition among LGBTQ+ audiences for its honesty and emotional warmth.
BEST SCENES
📍 The “Better” sequence—the girls dancing, laughing, and breathing the same air—captures the film’s soul. It’s both a confession and a celebration: two girls discovering that joy can exist even in grief. Their chemistry glows like sunlight through water, a reminder that love at sixteen doesn’t need permission to feel infinite.
My First Summer Review
Review
Few films capture the delicacy of first love the way My First Summer does. Director Katie Found approaches the story not as tragedy, but as rebirth—a poetic meditation on grief, awakening, and the way love can arrive quietly, like sunlight through a curtain.
Claudia’s world begins in silence. The camera lingers on dust, the shimmer of water, the rhythm of her breath. Then Grace appears—red lipstick, bare feet, laughter that feels like rebellion. The contrast between them is almost mythic: the girl who knows nothing of the world, and the girl who wants to save it.
There’s something intoxicating about their chemistry. Each glance is a pulse, each hesitation a confession. Their love grows in fragments: a shared bite of a candy necklace, a hesitant kiss, a gaze that feels both pure and dangerous. The intimacy is never explicit—it’s all suggestion, heartbeat, and warmth.
This is not a story of lust, but of discovery. Grace teaches Claudia not only how to feel love, but how to exist. And in return, Claudia teaches Grace what tenderness means beyond chaos and performance.
The film’s pacing is slow, dreamlike, and painterly. Each frame feels sun-drenched, washed in pinks and golds, like the memory of a summer you can’t quite forget. Even the open ending—when the authorities break their fragile world—feels earned. You don’t need to see what happens next. You just know that, somehow, they will carry each other forever.
My First Summer is a story of mutual salvation, of youth too pure to survive the adult world—and yet too powerful to be erased. It’s sweet, haunting, and impossibly human.
My First Summer Information
Film Festival Recognition
Official Selection – Adelaide Film Festival (2020)
Best Australian Narrative Nominee – Melbourne Queer Film Festival
Widely praised by LGBTQ+ critics for its authentic portrayal of queer adolescence and emotional intimacy
Frequently cited as one of the best Australian lesbian films of the 2020s
Where to Watch
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