Beasts of the Southern Wild

 2012, d. Benh Zeitlin - Crave

A place called "the Bathtub", a sinking island off the coast of New Orleans. The culture there is one of community, self-sustaining, and utilizing the discards of the mainland in creative ways. They teach the ways of their land from one generation to the next, whether it's catfishing by hand or what mix of herbs to help an ailment. To outsiders their little slice of life might seem like the direst poverty, but to them it's the only way, and there's little worthwhile in the outside world, though they're painfully aware of its existence. 

The culture is painted with its own history, its own stories, its own sensibilities, which gives it such a distinct tangibility that one would mistake it for a fictionalized version of a real place, but it's all a fantasy... which in a weird way makes it one of the great fantasies put to film, and yet one cannot help but think that this is an uncomfortable glorification of poverty.

After a great flooding of the Bathtub, our protagonist, her father and what remains of her people are wrangled up and taken to a temporary evacuee shelter, where they're given clothes, food and medical attention, force upon them against their will. The severity of it recalls E.T. the Extra Terrestrial, where the people charged with generally caring for these people as a whole are villified...somewhat. There's definitely allegories at play (think of "for the greater good" policies inflicted upon indigenous populations all over the world) and yet is living unbathed in filthy squalor something we should be celebrating and championing Hushpuppy, our 6-year-old hero played by the captivating Quvenzhané Wallis, to return to?

It's a complex subtext to wade through. The traditions and the pride in community are enviable to the utmost degree, but the routine drunken nights, the squalid 3rd-world living conditions, the floating whorehouse with a heart of gold ten miles off the coast (where perhaps our hero's estranged mother works)... this isn't a healthy ecosystem. As a routine the Bathtub teeters on the brink of life and death and yet it's denizens seem more than content with it. But is it choice, or lack of choices that keep them there?

Fascinating movie especially after recently watching Nomadland which also has a complicated narrative with America poverty, and the "choice" of poverty as a liberating value.

[Toasty's take]