Beasts of the Southern Wild

Directed by Benh Zeitlin. Screenplay, Lucy Alibar, Zeitlin, based on the stage play "Juicy and Delicious" by Alibar.

Already a 4-time Cannes Award Winner and 2-time Sundance Award Winner (both 2012) comes the mystical and precious BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD

I saw this amazing movie today with Lee.  I can't remember the last time I was saw a movie as powerful as this.  I am sort of speechless about it, I will have to see it again. 

 

At home in the Bathtub, a marshy swampland off the coast of southern Louisiana, 6-year-old Hushpuppy lives by au're small, you gotta fix what you can."

Wink by Dwight Henry. Wink can be cruel at times, as when he hits Hushpuppy after her attempt to prepare her own dinner sends part of their ramshackle home up in flames, but his principal concern is for the girl's safety. Once the rains come, he becomes her fierce protector, that establishes the emotional backbone for the picture.



 

An almost primordial wilderness cut off from the rest of Louisiana by a long wall of levees. Here, an unapologetically uncivilized crowd of humans live alongside the animals that sustain them, blissfully disconnected from their resource-burning neighbors to the north. When judgment comes in the form of rising tides and vengeful beasts, this mystical realm independent of government and law will be the first to feel the consequences. 

The children face the greatest danger. Among them, Hushpuppy, possessed of incredible poise and almost feral intensity, already fends reasonably well for herself, sharing a sort of treehouse trailer with her father, Wink who hasn't been the same since Hushpuppy's mom "swam away" years earlier.

Possessed of incredible poise and almost feral intensity) already fends reasonably well for herself, sharing a sort of treehouse trailer with her father, Wink.

In a forgotten but defiant bayou community cut off from the world by a sprawling levee, six year-old Hushpuppy exists on the brink of orphanhood.   Her mother long gone, and her father Wink a wildman on a perpetual spree, Hushpuppy is left to her own devices on an isolated compound filled with semi-feral animals.   She perceives the natural world to be a fragile web of living, breathing, squirting things, in which the entire universe depends on everything fitting together just right.

it's a story about the sort of people that we never get to meet on film and a part of the world that, even though it's just off the coast of America, it seems so remote and so different and alien it's quite extraordinary really

Every culture has its flood myth, and with this project, Zeitlin and Alibar create a new American fable all the more potent in the wake of Katrina

 

This is a daring film and a very moving one made with extraordinary integrity by Zeitlin who belongs to a film co-operative in New Orleans called Court 13. He was also one of the composers on the film and the music is an important part of it.

QUVENZANHE ALLIS (KOO-VEN-ZA-NAY)