Acclaimed filmmaker Karen Skloss (Sunshine) world premieres her psychedelic teen horror film THE HONOR FARM, at this year’s SXSW.
When Lucy’s prom night falls apart, she finds herself jumping into a hearse headed for a psychedelic party in the woods. Looking for a thrill, the party wanders deeper into the forest, to a haunted and abandonded prison work farm. A secret wish and a summoning of the dead sends the group on a mind-bending trip into a dangerous trap.
THE HONOR FARM takes the most beloved youth genres – horror, coming of age, 80’s teen comedies – and blends them all together in original and clever ways to tell a story of one high school girl’s surreal passage to adulthood. Picking up where Pretty in Pink left off, while taking notes from Heathers and River’s Edge, THE HONOR FARM is a movie about taking the familiar from a canted angle and making it new and fresh to behold.
Featuring a standout central performance from Olivia Applegate (NBC’s Revolution, upcoming in Terrence Malick’s Song to Song), and made by a successful Austin-based filmmaking team – including director Skloss, producer David Hartstein, co-producer Jason Wehling, and executive producer (and founder of SXSW) Louis Black.
Filmmaker Bio:
Skloss is an award-winning filmmaker whose work has been shown on HBO, at NYC’s MOMA, in wide theatrical release, and in film festivals internationally. “Sunshine,” her first documentary feature as director, premiered at the SXSW film festival and was nationally broadcast on PBS’s Emmy Award winning series, Independent Lens. Skloss’ work as an editor includes the celebrated documentary, “Be Here to Love Me: The Story of Townes Van Zandt” (dir. Margaret Brown) as well as, “Taken by Storm” (dir. Roddy Bogawa), which outlines the storied career of Hipgnosis album artist Storm Thorgerson. She has edited several other documentary features as well as shows for Jerry Bruckheimer Television, A&E, Discovery, TLC and TNT. She is also the drummer for the band, Moving Panoramas.
Karen began her career in film as an actress playing Odile in the feature film “Odile and Yvette at the Edge of the World,” which premiered at the Edinburgh International Film Festival in 1995. “The Honor Farm” is her first narrative feature and a loose follow up to her narrative short, “Smitten” which premiered at The Rotterdam International Film Festival and was distributed through Hart Sharp Video.
