Louisiana-shot Cannes, Sundance winner set to make premiere at home

Unlike a lot of movies shot in Louisiana, Beasts of the Southern Wild couldn’t have been made anywhere else. Louisiana natives and the state’s bayous and marshes tell the fictional story of a 6-year-old girl named Hushpuppy and her struggle for survival in the southern Delta with her ailing father as a storm approaches. The film is gripping audiences around the globe for its portrayal of the spirit and resiliency of the people of south Louisiana through the fictional tale of a motherless young girl trying to hold on to her place in the world—that place being a small, tightly knit shantytown on the bayou just beyond the government’s levee protection system. Beasts of the Southern Wild was shot in southern Terrebonne Parish and Isle de Jean Charles, a real bayou community that is gradually eroding away. But the film’s makers say it isn’t a social issue movie. “It’s really about what it’s like to lose the thing that made you,” says director Benh Zeitlin, a native New Yorker and one of only a handful of people affiliated with the film who isn’t from Louisiana. The movie won the grand jury prize in the U.S. dramatic competition at the Sundance Independent Film Festival as well as that festival’s cinematography award. At France’s Cannes Film Festival in May, where many U.S. films were shut out, Louisiana’s indie darling won the Camera d’Or for best first film. Its Louisiana premiere will take place in New Orleans in early July. The Associated Press has the full story here.