Discussing Friendship, Fantasy, and Fear in Avalon Fast’s CAMP
Still from CAMP. Photo courtesy of the Calgary Underground Film Festival.
Enchanting and ominous, CAMP is both a beautifully shot coming-of-age story and an unsettling entry into the ever-growing canon of summer camp horror films. What begins as a story of learning to move past grief by opening yourself up to new friendships, invites viewers to step into something more fantastical as they follow Emily (Zola Grimmer) over the course of one summer.
There’s a particular intensity to the friendships made at summer camp. Being away from home for the first time offers an uncomfortable in-between experience of combining shaky attempts at independence, with the awkwardness of adolescence.
Director Avalon Fast describes her first memories of summer camp as particularly memorable, “you're hyper aware of everything maybe for one of the first times in your life… because you're kind of shocked into survival mode… I could tell you who I would first make friends with and I could tell you what those cabins looked like.”
Fast’s own memories set the backdrop for the camp for troubled youth at the heart of the film, where Emily becomes a camp counsellor as an attempt at easing her grief.
“I went to a lot of summer camps when I was a kid and I would always get homesick,” Fast says. “Even though I didn't grow up religious, they were often Bible camps… it was this strange overarching energy of Christianity while you're just a kid trying to have a fun time.”
That slightly twisted coming-of-age experience follows Emily as she finds herself pulled into a tightly knit group of counsellors who offer her a sense of belonging, but there’s an anxiety lingering under the surface.
For Fast, the emotional core of the film lies in the friendships Emily finds. “For myself, the reason I’m alive is my friendships and my relationships. And I think in a time of grief, those friendships are the thing that carries you through.”
The push and pull Emily finds herself in, between healing and losing herself in others, is central to her journey. “It’s kind of melting into your friendships,” Fast says, “and at some point maybe losing yourself a little bit in that deepness as well. But maybe that’s okay for a while.”
Fast invites audiences to fall into the feeling of losing yourself by leaning into the fantasy. “I would tell my actors, that everything that happens in the script, at least from my perspective, is grounded in reality, So even these fantastical moments for me.. it's not like you're on some drug trip and you're seeing things that aren't there. For me, it was about noticing the things that you maybe normally aren't observing.”
The beauty of these fantastical scenes are in part thanks to the hand-drawn animated sequences created by Calgary artist Sofiya Iurkevych. “There’s something more human about real 2D animation versus just classic special effects,” Fast says. “I think it's such a beautiful way to make those moments feel out of body.”
Though originally meant to be set in British Columbia, CAMP ultimately found its home in Alberta, something Fast was initially unsure about. “I was a little bit opposed to it in the beginning,” Fast admits. “But we shot out in Kananaskis and based ourselves in Calgary, and every location we found was just gorgeous.”
That unfamiliarity ended up shaping the film in unexpected ways. “It really felt like getting to go to summer camp in a strange way,” Fast says. “Actually getting to go somewhere that was kind of unfamiliar and foreign to me… now I can't imagine doing it anywhere else.”
One of Fast’s favourite memories captures the spirit of the film perfectly. While waiting for the sun to go down in order to shoot one of the film’s campfire scenes, the crew gathered around a gas powered fire to share personal horror stories from sets they’ve been on. Despite being a prop for the film, “it really just felt like a campfire, it was just a real human moment in the middle of making a movie.”
After an international run of festivals, CAMP is returning home to Calgary on the final day of the Calgary Underground Film Festival. “It really feels like bringing the film home,” said Fast. “We did a screening at the Rio in Vancouver recently and that's my home ground, so, it's a lot of my friends, but in Calgary, there’s also so many collaborators on the film and the crew… it'll be a big hometown reunion.”
CAMP will have it’s Alberta premiere screening at the Calgary Underground Film Festival on Sunday, April 26th, while the screening is now sold out, you may have luck joining the rush line!