A toast to the New Year.
To Mexico, to Brazil, to Australia, to France, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Bosnia, Abu Dhabi, Spain, Ukraine, England, Australia, Sweden, and to many cities across the USA, here's to the spectacular and endlessly bizarre journey of ushering Beasts of the Southern Wild into the world.
Let’s extend a glass to everyone who stormed lobbies around the world and demanded Q and As, snuck me into an ancient relic, chanted with me at a football, futbol, or footy match, showed me new films, new food, new music, new art, danced with Quvenzhané, danced with sheiks, jumped naked into bodies of water on several different continents, drank anything with an animal in the bottle, carried me home or onto an airplane. To quote A.O. Scott speaking about our comrades the Ross Brothers' new film Tchopitoulas (in theaters now), "the pursuit of fun can be a profound and transformative experience." And it has been.
Let’s all have a cup of Auld Lang Syne. Looking forward to a new year of channeling all this fun into the work of creating a new film for this incredible, and now international family that Beasts has created.
In 2013 we are hoping to get started on not just films, but also to begin the work of transforming Court 13 into a multi-disciplinary Louisiana Arts Organization. Our kick-off for the new era will be a museum exhibit at the CAC in New Orleans on March 8th, where we'll be showing our short films as well as paintings, photographs, theater, music, sculpture, and interviews that inspired them and were created through them. Stay tuned for updates.
Also, if you are in the States, please track down our blu-ray that has a lot of the story behind how the film was created, beautifully rendered. If you’re somewhere else in the world, we may still be coming to a theater near you. And the soundtrack is out on vinyl and sounds pretty as all outdoors!
Cheers, Cherio, Topa, Salut, Prost, Budmo, Skol, Na Zdavje, L' Chaim.
Lets do this again and forever.
Love,
Benh
Director of Beasts of the Southern Wild
(Illustration by Jess X Chen)