A world of imagination
On the surface, Benh Zeitlin's film seems simple but at its heart it carries a green message, writes Richard James Havis
Cinema has always been a contradictory art form, resting in a unique space between fantasy and reality. This apparent paradox gives rise to what is often called "the magic of cinema": we believe in the reality of the image on the screen, even though we know what we are seeing is not real at all. That's what gives cinema the power to make us believe that, while we are watching a movie, men can have superpowers, strange animals can exist, and people can come back from the dead.
The magic of cinema is beautifully illustrated in Beasts of the Southern Wild, a movie by American filmmaker Benh Zeitlin that received four Oscar nominations this year.
On one level, it's a naturalistic tale of a young girl and her father struggling to survive a gigantic flood in the Louisiana wetlands. But there is also a fantasy element: a group of huge, porcine beasts released from the melting polar ice-caps to take nature's revenge on humanity for its bad management of the environment. The skill of the filmmakers ensures that the leaps from reality to fantasy feel natural and part of the same world.
The story, which is based on the play Juicy and Delicious by co-screenwriter Lucy Alibar, is fully fictitious, but seemingly has its genesis in Hurricane Katrina and the flooding of New Orleans in 2005. It's set in the Bathtub, an isolated place cut off from the world by levees. The Bathtub is peopled by a group who live close to nature in an almost primitive fashion. When the area is flooded, six-year-old Hushpuppy is forcefully tutored by her father Wink in the ways of survival. As Hushpuppy and the other survivors bide their time, trying to get by until the waters recede, a group of prehistoric creatures called aurochs bear down on them from afar.
We were going to experience the real world from the point of view of someone who is six years old
The story is loose, and serves as both a coming-of-age narrative about a young African American, and an ecological tale about humankind's mistreatment of the environment. Thirty-year-old Zeitlin, who lives in Westchester County in New York state, says he worked hard to balance the realistic elements with the fantasy sequences. "The idea was always that the film was going to be set in the real world. But we were going to experience the real world from the point of view of someone who is six years old," he says.