Beasts of the Southern Wild is a amazing debut film by director Benh Zeitlin, from a play by Lucy Alibar, a fellow

writer that Zeitlin met in a writer's

workshop as a teenager. The unlikely star of the film is six year old Quvenzhan Wallis, who had to pretend to be six when she was five to beat out 4,000 others for this part in auditions. Her character is to be brave and strong, so Nazie, as they call her, said she was that way in the audition at a local library. The basic story is that of a motherless girl called Hushpuppy in a bayou region of an island in the Mississippi River delta area of Louisiana, the part past land's end, trying to survive amid poverty, separated from societal infrastructure, with only a handful of other residents for interaction and diversity. It's a stark, primitive existence, without any modern pleasures.

Her father is brilliantly played by New Orleans 7th ward caf owner,

Dwight Young, also

with no previous acting experience, and who already has won two awards for best supporting actor. He plays dad Wink, who has heart trouble, and knows he won't be around while Hushpuppy grows up, so he is raising her to be the man. He demand of her "who's the man?" and she flexes her biceps and says "I'm the man!" This is probably going to be repeated often by fans of this film. Her name is Hushpuppy likely because she feeds all the animals, their only source of food other than the river and gulf, where they catch catfish, crawfish, crabs, and other local bounty. Like everyone in low coastal areas, these few residents of an area known as The Bathtub are constantly threatened by storms, flooding, and global melting, which will easily inundate these low lying areas.

This is the best made coming-of-age story since To Kill a Mockingbird, and Wallis' performance is much tougher and more demanding than Mary Badham's, and seems more natural - you get the feeling that Nazie is not far out of her element in boats and mud in the delta. Rather than ruin this film by too much story or analysis, as it's a magical journey of myth-making proportions, I'll let you see through these links the impact of this film, whichBarack Obama called "a spectacular film - even my 4 year old niece was captivated".

Awards and Nominations

Beasts currently leads with 35 (six so far for Nazie Wallis), including wins at Sundance, and four at Cannes (next high film is Zero Dark Thirty at 21, The Master with 20, and Argo with 19): http://www.beastsofthesouthernwild.com/news/beasts-awards-and-nominations/ The film's trailer from Cannes The film page at Facebook, where people are telling their stories of this film's impact on their families or children, as well as many other links.

The Iranian Film Industry (or the Cinema of Iran; in Persian: ) refers to the cinema and film industries in Iran which produce a variety of commercial films annually. Iranian art films have garnered international fame and now enjoy a global following.[4] Along with China, Iran has been lauded as one of the best exporters of cinema in the 1990s. [5] Some critics now rank Iran as the world's most important national cinema, artistically, with a significance that invites comparison to Italian neorealism and similar movements in past decades.[4] A range of international film festivals have honored Iranian cinema in the last twenty years. World-renowned Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke and German filmmaker Werner Herzog, along with many film critics from around the world, have praised Iranian cinema as one of the world's most important artistic cinemas.[6]

Visual arts in Persia[edit]

See also: Persian theatre The earliest examples of visual representations in Iranian history may be traced back to the basreliefs in Persepolis (c. 500 B. C.). Bas relief is a method of sculpting which entails carving or etching away the surface of a flat piece of stone or metal. Persepolis was the ritual center of the ancient kingdom of Achaemenids and "the figures at Persepolis remain bound by the rules of grammar and syntax of visual language."[7] Iranian visual arts maybe said to have peaked about a thousand years later during the Sassanian reign. A basrelief from this period in Taq-e-Bostan (western Iran) depicts a complex hunting scene. Similar works from the period have been found to articulate movements and actions in a highly sophisticated manner. It is even possible to see the progenitor of the cinema close-up: a wounded wild pig escaping from the hunting ground,[8] among these works of art. After the conversion from Zoroastrianism to Islam a religion in which visual symbols were avoided Persian art continued its visual practices. Persian miniatures provide great examples of such continued attempts. The deliberate lack of perspective in Persian miniature enabled the artist to have different plots and sub-plots within the same image space. A very popular form of such art was Pardeh-Khani. Another type of art in the same category was Naqqali.[8] Popular dramatic performance arts in Iran, before the advent of cinema, include Khaymeshab-bazi (puppet show), Saye-bazi (shadow plays), Rouhozi (comical acts), and Ta'zieh.[9]

Early Persian cinema[edit]

Cinema was only five years old when it came to Persia at the beginning of the 20th century. The first Persian filmmaker wasMirza Ebrahim Khan Akkas Bashi, the official photographer of Muzaffar al-Din Shah, the Shah of Persia from 18961907. After a visit to Paris in July 1900, Akkas Bashi obtained a camera and filmed the Shah's visit to Europe upon the Shah's orders. He is said to have filmed the Shah's private and religious ceremonies, but no copies of such films exist today. A few years after Akkas Bashi started photography, Khan

Baba Motazedi, another pioneer in Iranian motion picture photography emerged.[10] He shot a considerable amount of newsreel footage during the reign of Qajar to the Pahlavi dynasty.[11] In 1904, Mirza Ebrahim Khan Sahhafbashi opened the first movie theater in Tehran.[10] After Mirza Ebrahim Khan, several others like Russi Khan, Ardeshir Khan, and Ali Vakili tried to establish new movie theaters in Tehran. Until the early 1930s, there were little more than 15 theatres in Tehran and 11 in other provinces.[8] In 1925, Ovanes Ohanian, decided to establish the first film school in Iran. Within five years he managed to run the first session of the school under the name "Parvareshgahe Artistiye cinema" (The Cinema Artist Educational Centre).[12]