Wilmington-based film production company Honey Head Films is making the rounds at film festivals this spring, recently winning the prize for best narrative feature at the Oxford Film Festival in Mississippi.
Honey Head co-founder Kristi Ray and her team have been touring across the country showing the company’s first feature-length film, A Song for Imogene, at festivals from Rhode Island to Wisconsin and back home to Wilmington since the film premiered in June.
Next, Honey Head will head to Winston-Salem and then Atlanta for the next two film festivals on their schedule. The Atlanta Film Festival is one the team is particularly excited about, Ray said. Acceptance into the film festival is not an easy feat, she added.
“It's highly competitive,” Ray said. “When we received the news about the Atlanta Film Festival acceptance, we were shocked because we know how hard it is to get into that fest.”
“It’s really been on our vision board, literally speaking, for the last four years. We received notification we were one of 30 films selected out of over 1,000 that were submitted in the feature film category.”
The Atlanta Film Festival takes place April 25 through May 5. A Song for Imogene will screen on April 27, Ray said. On their way to Georgia, the team will stop in Winston-Salem for the RiverRun International Film Festival on April 18. The RiverRun festival announced its lineup Tuesday.
“We’re actually going on a big, 12-day road trip, and we’re going to go out to Winston-Salem and travel down to Atlanta and screen the film at these multiple venues back-to-back, which is going to be a lot of fun,” Ray said.
Most recently, the Honey Head team won the prize for best narrative feature at the Oxford Film Festival last month.
They took a break from film festivals over the holidays, as events usually slow down during that time, Ray said. Prior to the holiday season, Ray and her co-founder Erika Arlee traveled to the Northeast in August to show their film at the Flickers’ Rhode Island International Film Festival in Providence, Rhode Island, where they took home first prize for best feature film, Ray said.
“We've never been to the state of Rhode Island. It was really fun to be able to premiere the film in the Northeast — it being such a southern story,” Ray said. “Their audience was very fascinated with the nuance of the South.”
After their win, they brought the film back home to Wilmington for the Cucalorus Film Festival, selling out Thalian Hall for the fest’s opening-night feature.