A Dozen Summers 2015

Maisie McCormack [Scarlet Hall] and Daisy McCormack [Hero Hall] are two ordinary twelve-year-olds navigating the minefield of life in the 21st century. To them, growing up feels like a constant puzzle, where grown-ups behave in peculiar, baffling ways and the rules of the world seem to shift just when you think you understand them. In their eyes, every day is a new scene in a movie they’re trying to piece together, a kaleidoscope of small moments that add up to something larger than themselves.

One day, they unexpectedly interrupt a children’s adventure story in progress by scaring off the Narrator [Colin Baker], hijacking the film to tell the story of their own lives through the lens of the movies they’ve seen. What begins as a playful defiance quickly becomes a bold, self-narrated journey, a metafictional adventure where their reality is reframed by cinema and memory, time-worn tropes, and the bright glow of imagination.

Jacqueline McCormack [Sarah Warren], their mother, is a striving model whose idiosyncratic parenting style shapes the family’s rhythm and expectations. Henry McCormack [Kenton Hall], their father, is a writer who has sacrificed more than the children realize to keep the home steady and safe. With this dynamic backdrop, the girls navigate the everyday pressures of home life, school, and social currents, all while holding onto the sense that their world is both ordinary and extraordinary.

Maisie and Daisy invite us into their day-to-day life, from daily battles with bullies Jennifer, Audrey and Beth to the pull of first love—Matty Archer, the school heartthrob for Maisie, whose charm complicates the halls of their school. Unbeknownst to Daisy, her own best friend Samuel adds a layer of friendship and potential romance to the mix, further blurring the line between childhood certainty and adolescent possibility. They take us through awkward dates with Jacqueline, through home life with Henry, and through school life that turns fantastical with added were-wolves and vampires, turning a familiar routine into a dazzling, eerie playground of imagination and fear.

As the narrative unfolds, they edge toward the first tentative steps into adulthood when Jacqueline settles into a more stable life and the plan to set their father up with their teacher, Miss Walters, begins to take shape. The clock ticks as the interrupted story threatens to re-claim its stage, forcing them to weigh ambition against the pull of the moment and the comfort of the life they know. It’s a race against time, and Maisie and Daisy learn that speed isn’t everything—sometimes the hardest journey is growing up without losing who you are along the way.

And in the end, the finish line isn’t a clean victory but a quiet, hopeful shift: a recognition that growing up, with all its uncertainties and surprises, isn’t something to fear but something to embrace as a new kind of story to tell.