Beasts of the Southern Wild is a amazing debut film by director Benh Zeitlin, from a play by Lucy Alibar, a fellow writer that Zeitlin met in a writer's workshop as a teenager. The unlikely star of the film is six year old Quvenzhané Wallis, who had to pretend to be six when she was five to beat out 4,000 others for this part in auditions. Her character is to be brave and strong, so Nazie, as they call her, said she was that way in the audition at a local library.
The basic story is that of a motherless girl called Hushpuppy in a bayou region of an island in the Mississippi River delta area of Louisiana, the part past land's end, trying to survive amid poverty, separated from societal infrastructure, with only a handful of other residents for interaction and diversity. It's a stark, primitive existence, without any modern pleasures.
