Bests of the Southern Wild (2012)

Directed and co-written b Benh Zeitlin and adapted from Lucy Alibar's one act play Juicy and Delicious, Beasts of the Southern Wild tells the story of a (roughly) seven year old girl named Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis) who lives with her father Wink (Dwight Henry) on a bayou island known as 'The Bathtub' on the wrong side of the Louisiana levee's. I've not seen a place quite like this on film before, though Conrack comes closest. It's a poor, wet, slowly rotting world but a home whose residents have deep attachment to it. Most of the story takes place in the aftermath of a sever storm that devastates the island, residents forcefully evacuated later stage a break out to get back to the island, even though there seems to be nothing worth going back to. Hushpuppy's father is an alcoholic prone to mysterious disappearances and the questionable state of his health, vague at first, gets increasingly clear as the movie goes on. Hushpuppy is a little hard to pin down, her sense of the world limited and skewed, her teacher on the islands one room school house is also a local witchdoctor so that does not help her sense of reality much. There is a scene where Hushpuppy and some friends run away and through course of events end up staying for a short while at a floating restaurant/ brothel where she becomes very attached to one of the cooks, the poor girl has never had a mother before (her's running off just after she was born) and the ache and need she has for a mother figure is just devastating. Kind of a hard watch at times. ***1/2