New images and synopsis for Spike Lee’s Red Hook Summer have appeared online

Before his upcoming rendition of OLDBOY, polarizing filmmaker Spike Lee will first unveil one of the bigger small films that will be hitting Sundance next year: RED HOOK SUMMER.

Starring primarily a cast of unknowns and the fantastic Clarke Peters (“Treme”, “The Wire”), RED HOOK SUMMER will have Lee returning to Brooklyn where he’ll tell the tale of a young Atlanta boy who spends a summer in Red Hook with his grandfather – a preacher – whom he’s never known.

Here we have three new images from the film as well as the official synopsis below. RED HOOK SUMMER will premiere at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, which runs January 19-29.

When his mom deposits him at the Red Hook housing project in Brooklyn to spend the summer with the grandfather he’s never met, young Flik may as well have landed on Mars. Fresh from his cushy life in Atlanta, he’s bored and friendless, and his strict grandfather, Enoch, a firebrand preacher, is bent on getting him to accept Jesus Christ as his personal savior. Only Chazz, the feisty girl from church, provides a diversion from the drudgery. As hot summer simmers and Sunday mornings brim with Enoch’s operatic sermons, things turn anything but dull as people’s conflicting agendas collide.

Playfully ironic, heightened, yet grounded, Spike Lee’s bold new movie returns him to his roots, where lovable, larger-than-life characters form the tinderbox of a tight-knit community. A story about the coexistence of altruism and corruption, Red Hook Summer toys with expectations, seducing us with the promise of moral and spiritual transcendence. Spike is back in the ‘hood.