HONEYCOMB

In the mundane hours of early summer, five girls sulk in their own boredom waiting for something. When Willow (Sophie Bawks-Smith) stumbles upon a seemingly abandoned cabin, she begins fantasizing about the life she and the girls could have there. She and her friends pack their bags and whisper a quick goodbye to the life they knew. They flow through open fields, blissfully entering their new sun-soaked world without a thought about the horrors that lie before them.

Filmed on Cortes Island, off the coast of mainland British Columbia, HONEYCOMB drops the viewer into a bucolic setting and lets summer take its toll. The girls’ idyllic commune becomes sun-bleached, and by the end they’re raw and exposed. Avalon Fast (CAMP), fresh out of high school at the time, recruited her friends to be cast and crew members, and the group made the trek to and from the island several times over the course of the summer to create this remarkable coming-of-age drama and piece of regional horror. The film's almost non-existent budget and unapologetically girlish energy conveys the femininity of Sofia Coppola with the riot grrrl sensibility of Sarah Jacobson.

HONEYCOMB is a way of feeling. A slow mindless space has been written with borderless rules and time to fill. The girls push for a meaning that is hardly there, struggling to reach out, grab it, and lock it in a box.

“Avalon Fast’s debut feature is a low-budget, sun-soaked folk horror film. A masterclass of DIY cinema that doesn’t fall short in achieving stunning shots with a gritty and powerful aesthetic, or in infusing this coming-of-age flick with ingenious storytelling.” - Celia Pouzet

“HONEYCOMB is a wild, wandering, wonderous film, a dreamy, abstracted portrait of that liminal space between adolescence and adulthood.” - Alexandra Heller-Nicholas