Sightlines · reception

How My First Summer was received

2020 · Katie Found · My First Summer on Sightlines

The arc

It slipped out quietly during the pandemic after premiering at the Adelaide Film Festival in October 2020, then found its real audience later on streaming — helped along once Markella Kavenagh became a familiar face as Nori in The Rings of Power and viewers went digging through her back catalog.

What’s debated

The recurring split is whether its extreme gentleness is the whole point — a sapphic teen romance mercifully free of tragedy-porn — or whether, at a slight 77 minutes, it's almost too soft and low-stakes to leave a mark.

Its footprint

Its sun-dappled Australian-summer imagery made it a fixture of 'soft sapphic films to watch' lists and wlw film Twitter/Tumblr recommendation threads, where it's traded as a comfort watch rather than a talking point.

Where it stands

A quiet Letterboxd niche favorite — beloved within the sapphic coming-of-age micro-canon, largely unknown outside it.

Did you know? Markella Kavenagh had already been announced — in July 2019, as the very first cast member — for Amazon's mega-budget The Rings of Power before this tiny Australian indie even premiered, making it a 'before they were famous' artifact almost on arrival.