If you think you know a little bit about the lives of peoples around the world or of the mind of a 6-year old, you are mistaken and you have to watch this improbable, incredible, boisterous and difficult film: "Bests of the Southern Wild".Hushpuppy is an imaginative 6-year old living with her father in the "bathtub", an island cut off from the mainland Louisiana by a levee. She lives with her pets and her dreams in whatever little life has to offer in this extreme habitat. When a big storm approaches and her father begins to die, and the ice caps begin to melt and the wild pre-historic beasts, the Aurochs, start to threaten her community, it is time for Hushpuppy to turn her life around.
There are good movies and then there are incredible movies - movies that must have been incredibly hard to conceptualize, to cast, to film, to direct and above all incredibly hard to sell - first to financiers and then to audiences. Beasts is one of those incredible films. You wonder how on a small budget of 2 Million Dollars (or probably because of it) some time of brilliant people was able to take a small one-act play called Juicy and Delicious by Lucy Alibar and conceptualize it into this truly amazing, unbelievably moving experience of lives - so different and so surreal - that you cannot take your eyes of the screen even though you are largely appalled by the harrowing conditions people are living in.
The film owes an intellectual credit to the other amazing beast tale - Where the Wild Things Are.
Thankfully, the film has been given due credit and recognized by mainstream audiences and critics. It has been nominated for 4 Oscars including Best Picture and Quvenzhané Wallis the brilliant 6-year old Hushpuppy, is now the youngest ever to have been nominated for Best Actress.
Compare this to useless trivia like the "Silver Linings Playbook" and you wonder - is it fantastic or blasphemous to put these two movies in the same Best Picture list?
