Honeycomb

avalonfast5.0

I made this… So maybe I’m bias…but Honeycomb is so awesome…

Vera Drew5.0

Avalon Fast’s no budget directorial debut is a magical movie. Honestly, from now on, when people at Q&As ask me for filmmaking advice or say something like “film school sucks and I don’t know if I should stay,” I am just going to tell them to go watch Honeycomb. It so elegantly epitomizes what can be done in DIY film. I truly think the future of cinema is stuff like this - communities of friends coming together and making something singular that only that collective of people could make. You can feel the friendship and the joy of the craft ooze through each frame. The fact that it’s made by people fresh out of high school and is about that period of “what now” makes it feel like this intimate, special window into a time that we all experience, take for granted, and never can return to. I kept thinking about liminal spaces and how much that period of 18-22 feels like a liminal space. An abandoned house in the woods. I guess we’ll party in it or set up a shrine to something we don’t understand but feel drawn to. We’ll make rules so we don’t become animals but we’ll follow the rules so much that we become animals and we’ll kill and die and be reborn. Girls becoming women trying to talk like the books they’ve read, boys cursing and drinking beer like the men they think they are but haven’t become yet. Til they’re all buried and come back with golden honey hair.Sorry. I swear I’m like…not stuck in self 24/7 but if I can make it all about me for a second: The film’s fixation on bees (I spent the the evening working on a bee emblem that appears in my next film), the discussion of freemasonry (another thing I’m talking a lot about in pretty much everything I make always but definitely the next thing), and a pretty fantastic plot point/character moment centered around Strawberry Fields (I’m in my Beatles phase right now as a 35 year old sober tgirl)…I’ve known about this movie for months because I just edited Alice Maio MacKay’s new movie (which costars Avalon), but I randomly (nothing is random) watched it tonight of nights because I was supposed to watch it tonight. Nothing, absolutely nothing happens in this world by mistake. In my clearest moments I see that. There were a few fleeting seconds watching this tonight where I felt this overwhelming sense of “I wish I had just done this when I was her age…film school held me back.” But those moments were quickly squashed like a bug whenever I fell back into the rhythm of watching the film. A film that seems quite aware of the persistence and frustration of time. I used to have a (not very good) therapist who used to say something (in retrospect) very wise whenever I would future trip or get caught up in regret: “You’re right on time.” It’s hard to sit in, surrender to the fact that you can’t go back and you can’t go forward, but what other choice do we even have. We come of age when we’re supposed to and it doesn’t happen once.The compositions in this are better than most movies. Like, the cinematography and pacing can be amateur at times, but the actual framing, camera blocking, and composition are like…intuitively brilliant. It’s so hard to stack that many people into one frame and make it beautiful or feel even remotely natural and pretty much every shot in this film is fucking gorgeous. I mean, Avalon is clearly a great director but there’s some real cinematic Masonic sacred geometry here that can only happen as the result of making something beautiful with your beehive of friends, right on time.

Will Sloan

A strange, artful, lightly surreal no-budget feature by 22-year-old Avalon Fast, about five teenage girls who take over a cabin in the woods to create a new society away from adults and (especially) boys. They structure their new society around one rule - any hurt can be responded to with an equal hurt - and things unravel from there. This is the part of the review where you're supposed to say that this is "technically imperfect," but fuck that - I like this movie's DIY Picnic at Hanging Rock energy.My colleague Justin released this ona very nice Blu-Ray, and I swear he is not paying me to tell you this.