'Camp' Director Avalon Fast on Sacred Alberta
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- Avalon Fast wrote and directed "Camp," her second feature after 2022's "Honeycomb"; the film won the Next Wave award at last year's Fantastic Fest and is now in theaters via Dark Sky Films.
- "Camp" follows Emily (Zola Grimmer), a counselor at a remote camp for kids dealing with trauma, who bonds with four other counselors — played by Alice Wordsworth, Cherry Moore, Lea Rose Sebastianis, and Ella Reece — exploring witchcraft together.
- DP Eily Sprungman grew up close to Fast in Alberta, Canada; the pair drew the film's largest visual inspiration from the "sacredness" and "magic" of that shared land and referenced Renaissance art, including a dedicated Ophelia shot.
- Fast cast some actors just a month before shooting and said the women organically formed a real-life "unit" that informed their on-screen coven dynamic.
- Fast has publicly committed to making "one more girl horror cult movie" plus a film "about a boy" to branch out from girl-centered stories.
Why it matters: "Camp" arrives theatrically via Dark Sky Films carrying Fantastic Fest's Next Wave award — concrete validation for Fast as a micro-budget genre filmmaker on only her second feature. By rooting the film's emotional core in Alberta land she and her DP grew up on rather than effects work, Fast offers a replicable model for emerging supernatural filmmakers working with intimate budgets.
