Benh Zeitlin…now there’s a name we haven’t heard in a while. Ever since breaking out in 2012 with "Beasts Of The Southern Wild," the filmmaker has kept a low profile, and while most would use the kind of buzz he earned on that picture to make studio deals or work in television, Zeitlin seems to be forging his own creative path. In late fall 2013, he described the wild premise of his next picture.
"The new film is about a young girl who gets kidnapped onto a hidden ecosystem where a tribal war is raging over a form of pollen that breaks the relationship between aging and time," Zeitlin said at the time. "It follows a friendship-love story-adventure of her and a joyous, reckless, pleasure-mongering young boy as they swirl in and out of youth and as the ecosystem around them spirals toward destruction. We’re working on it all day every day, but as all psychotic adventures go, you know where your destination is but not how long it’s going to take to get there."
Two years later, the film is finally gearing up, and Antigua Observer reports that the movie, tentatively titled "Wendy," will shoot in the country, and that casting is already underway. And Zeitlin promises more of his hand-built aesthetic for the movie.
“It’s not a hundred million-dollar movie coming in with airplanes and giant everything. It’ll be a small group of people building out of scrap metal and things we find, and the interesting thing is that even though we’re such a small production the reach could be very, very far,” Zeitlin said.
So, see you on the festival circuit on 2016? Fingers crossed. [via The Film Stage]