To celebrate our tenth anniversary, we asked Film Streams staff and board members to pick their top ten from the more than 1,600 films that illuminated the screens of the Ruth Sokolof Theater during its first decade. What emerged was a series that champions some of the finest independent and foreign films released in the last ten years.
BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD is a masterful piece of magical realism and social commentary.
Director Benh Zeitlin spoke to Interview about creating the mythical Louisiana Bathtub and infusing it with reality, “It’s an athletic event. Sometimes you imagine a place and then you find it. I’d written this story, and I was driving down every road in Louisiana, into the marsh, trying to see what was at the very end of the road. I remember getting to the end of the road in the film and I saw this horse standing on this island — it’s in the movie, actually — but seeing that, it was like, ‘This is the last stand.’ This horse is standing on this tiny island and the land is crumbling away. I was like, ‘This is it.’ The land is falling off into the gulf there, and the trees are dying. All the things that are happening in the story are happening there.
I wanted the film to sit above reality in way that a folktale does and be something that is very much about real issues that are happening in Louisiana, but also be able to travel and translate [issues] the way folktale can… I wanted that to be how the film spoke, as opposed to something that was entrenched in political issues or an environmental call to action.”
