Spinning Platters

After chatting with Quvenzhané Wallis and Dwight Henry, the stars of the massively acclaimed Sundance breakout Beasts of the Southern Wild, we sat down with its writer/director: Benh Zeitlin, a 29-year-old Queens native and Wesleyan graduate who has lived in New Orleans since 2008. Beasts is Zeitlin’s first feature film; it wrapped post-production just two days before its Sundance premiere catapulted Zeitlin and his cast into the spotlight, leading immediately to months of myriad promotional duties that are unlikely to cease until the end of awards season next year. When I asked Zeitlin what day he’d arrived in San Francisco, he said he did not remember. “I stick my credit card into the machine and a new city pops up and that’s where I go,” he said wearily. Although he says he’s gotten used to his press duties, which were initially “like getting hit in the face,” his flagging energy received a Bay Area boost when he visited the ILM headquarters. “Walking down those halls was incredible,” he said reverently. “I hadn’t realized all the stuff they’d done. Like Who Framed Roger Rabbit? That was my entire childhood! Just watching that three thousand times. It’s a temple. These movies are why you do what you do.”

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There was once a time when we looked to the Sundance Film Festival to present us with groundbreaking independent films that challenged and changed what we understood about contemporary cinema. But as the festival became increasingly infiltrated by major studios and A-list stars over the course of the ’90s, it lost its sense of revelatory edge; at its best, Sundance now gives well-known actors the opportunity to gain prestige and acclaim by doing smaller character-based films, and can usually be depended upon to introduce us to buzzy new ingenues and precocious young auteurs. But this year, a massively ambitious yet micro-budgeted film made by a principled collective in southern Louisiana hit the festival with enough impact to shake off decades of cynical atrophy. That film is Beasts of the Southern Wild, the feature-length directorial debut of 29-year-old Benh Zeitlin, and it is the full and total realization of the Sundance dream: not only does it introduce us to the staggering talents of new actors and filmmakers, but it majestically opens the gate to an entirely new and fantastical world. It is truly unlike anything you have ever seen.

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