Rising Stars

Beasts Of The Southern Wild is this year's American indie critical darling, the li'l film that's won big at Sundance and Cannes, and is earmarked for an Oscar date come 2013. It's the debut work of 29-year-old Benh Zeitlin, and charts the environmental degradation of Louisiana through the eyes of its six-year-old protagonist; which turns the events of Hurricane Katrina into a cresting, ecstatic, crowdpleasin' dream.

The film was shot in Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana, in an isolated fishing community whose home is – due to rising sea levels – steadily slipping into the sea. “When you play the film in Louisiana, it almost plays as a piece of realism: there are locally-recognised locations, characters, and lives,” says Zeitlin. “But, then, as you move away from Louisiana, it plays more and more as a fairytale. I was interested in taking these issues that seemed so local, and telling them in a way that was more like a fable; making the regional a universal story.”

Zeitlin had made a short film, Glory At Sea, that “centred on the post-storm experience in Southern Louisiana”, but after addressing the Southern state's receding shoreline intellectually, he wanted to do it emotionally, for Beasts Of The Southern Wild to “be about how it actually feels to live in a place that's endangered”.

“I was trying to understand what it is about this place that, in spite of practical logic, is so powerful and so meaningful to people,” Zeitlin explains. “I felt like these people who were holding out weren't being understood; I didn't understand them. Why fight so hard for a place that is dropping off into the Gulf Of Mexico?”

Beasts Of The Southern Wild is, then, “about places on the fringe of the world, both cultural and ecologically”. Says Zeitlin: “Places that are in sync with nature, in harmony with nature, those are increasingly devalued by modern society, and are not being protected; in some ways, they're being actively assaulted. These places are being threatened not just by the changing climate and environmental degradation, but by globalisation and modernity.”

This is his universal reading of a story that began life as a two-character, post-Katrina stageplay in New Orleans. From there, Zeitlin and playwright Lucy Alibar came up with a grander, more ecological, dreamlike reading, which required finding a child to play the main character, Hushpuppy, and, thus, carry the film. As they wrote the script, they spent nine months looking at more than 4,000 six-to-nine-year-old girls, before settling on five-year-old Quvenzhané Wallis. Once they'd assembled their cast of non-professionals, they began gathering in ad-hoc workshops in the bakery across the street from their casting office; where the filmmakers had, months before, discovered Dwight Henry, who plays Hushpuppy's father, working (“sometimes the universe is telling you just look right here in front of you”).

Rewriting the story to suit their non-professionals, they especially leant on Wallis to try and get the film's through-the-eyes-of-a-child fantasy to feel 'right'. “My memory of being that age, reality and fantasy aren't really separated in your brain,” Zietlin says. “When [Hushpuppy] starts feeling big things, they spill into this other world; and it's not one that's necessarily not real, but just one that she's imagining. Just like how this location that we're documenting is disappearing, so, too, will these imaginary worlds disappear when she gets older.”

WHAT: Beasts Of The Southern Wild

WHEN & WHERE: In cinemas Thursday 13 September