All of a Sudden, Beasts of the Southern Wild Is the Most Relevant Fable Ever

In a crass attempt to exploit storm-weary New Yorkers (kidding!), director Benh Zeitlin came onstage for a Q&A after a special screening of Beasts of the Southern Wild in Astoria. What once seemed like a whimsical (and extremely parochial) fable about residents of a South Louisiana town trying to patch up their community after a hurricane now, in the wake of Sandy, seems like it has the potential to resonate with pretty much everyone who lives in a coastal region and therefore can look forward to experiencing an annual “Storm of the Century.”

Zeitlin told the Wall Street Journal‘s Barbara Chai that, though his film sprung out of the storm-ravage Gulf Coast, Sandy proves that the world’s weather (and thus, the world’s sea-dwelling population) is changing:

“For me, this film wasn’t about the past, it was about the future. When I was writing the film it was in 2008 when we had Gustav and Ike, really bad hurricanes not in New Orleans but in the South where we shot the film. It was inspired by a moment of just realizing that storms used to come every 100 years, then they came every 50 years, now it’s like every three years. It was really about a future where storms are a perpetual threat.

I do feel South Louisiana is the first place to deal with this, but that’s what it is, the first. The world is changing, the planet is changing, and this is something that’s going to become a big part of everybody’s lives. It’s crazy to come up here and see the same thing happen in a place where no one was prepared for it or expecting it.”

Let’s hope the mostly-underwater Manhattan envisioned by the mostly-terrible (except for Jude Law!) A.I. is something that we can collectively avoid. [via WSJ]