Quvenzhané Wallis.
 
Beasts Of The Southern Wild is a stunning film with an absolutely amazing performance by young actress Quvenzhané Wallis. Directed by Benh Zeitlin with great delicacy and vision, the movie deals with the spiritual consequences of life out of balance with nature and the struggle of a community of outcasts to maintain their identity as a tribe and as individuals.

Using hurricane Katrina as both the reality and a metaphor for what happens when people are torn from their roots, the film is a deftly constructed blend of harsh truths and dreamlike fantasy - without the dreams, the movie, like its characters, would be trapped in almost unbearable suffering. This was not always so. The scenes before the great storm hits are almost magical in their depiction of life in a mythical southern Louisiana bayou called The Bathtub. Dirt poor, but living in tune with the bountiful waters surrounding them, the denizens of The Bathtub are a motley collection of drunks, soothsayers and wild children who seem to have wandered out of the same asylum as the townsfolk in King Of Hearts. With the arrival of Katrina they are confronted not only with devastation to their ramshackle homes but to their souls as well.

Beasts Of The Southern Wild is one of those magic-realist fables that require you to suspend belief and surrender to the story’s flow in order to fully enter its world. Prehistoric creatures appear in the film, the power of voodoo thickens the air and characters often seem more like apparitions than embodiments of flesh and blood. Cynics and those who resist having their tears jerked may find the movie’s sentimental moments cloying and its narration by the little girl, Hushpuppy, too heavy on homegrown homilies, but I fell under the movie’s spell and longed to return to the magic lurking in those southern wilds.

Beasts Of The Southern Wild is playing in New York City and L.A. and starts a national roll-out on July 13.
 

 
If you’re interested in seeing what director Benh Zeitlin can do, here’s a short film he made in 2008 called Glory at Sea . It contains the visual flavor that his new film refines.