My Summer of Love

Pawlikowski knew Paddy Considine from their earlier collaboration Last Resort and cast him as Phil. Casting the two lead actresses for the film proved difficult for Pawlikowski, and the overall casting procedure took about eight months. Pawlikowski searched in schools, universities, theatre groups and public castings. He discovered Natalie Press first, and sought her counterpart by holding workshops together with Press and Considine. During this process, he finally found Emily Blunt, and felt her to be the ideal Tamsin.

The film was shot during the span of five weeks after intensive location scouting by Pawlikowski. The script was minimalist and many scenes were improvised while shooting. The scene in which Mona draws a portrait of Tamsin on the wall of her room was entirely improvised—during Pawlikowski's traveling together with Press, he discovered that she used to do a lot of drawing while she was thinking, so he decided to integrate it into the movie and made a scene out of it.

The score of the film was written by Goldfrapp and the movie theme is a variation of the Goldfrapp song "Lovely Head", the first single from their 2000 album Felt Mountain.

My Summer of Love was first screened at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, being released across the UK on 5 November 2004. In the US, the film was initially screened at the Seattle International Film Festival on 20 May 2005, before going into a limited release across the US on 17 June 2005.

In the US, the film grossed $90,000 on its opening weekend, in 17 theaters; and went on to be released across 63 theaters, grossing a total $1,000,915 in the 8 weeks of its release. Worldwide, it grossed an additional $1,766,061, for a lifetime gross of $2,766,976. On Metacritic it has a weighted average score of 82 out of 100 based on 31 reviews. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun Times, who gave it three out of four, described it as "a movie that is more about being an age, than coming of age" and appreciated Pawlikowski's pacing. The New York Timess A. O. Scott termed it "a triumph of mood and implication", and James Berardinelli of ReelViews called it a "gem" lost in the "hype" of Hollywood blockbusters. Ty Burr of The Boston Globe deemed it "a conceit on a number of levels" and "confused between an 'artistic' lesbian movie and Heavenly Creatures", while commending Blunt's performance and the cinematography and declaring that "at its most interesting, [it] offers us the sight of people desperately embracing faith in the hopes it will pull them through". Steve Schneider of Orlando Weekly called it "slight and predictable at its core" but praised the performances and the "black humor" between the female characters "that endows the movie with most of its genuinely entertaining moments". Autostraddle listed the film as number 19 in a ranking of the 102 Best Lesbian Movies of All Time.

My Summer of Love won the Alexander Korda Award for Best British Film at the 2005 BAFTA Awards, the Directors Guild of Great Britain Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in British Film, and the award for Best New British Feature at the 2004 Edinburgh Film Festival. At the Evening Standard British Film Awards, Pawlikowski won for Best Screenplay, as did both Blunt and Press for Most Promising Newcomer. four European Film Awards nominations, and five nominations at the London Film Critics Circle Awards.