The Becoming Box. 2011. USA. Directed by Monique Walton. Screenplay by Walton, Paavo Hanninen. With Donna Duplantier, Jeremy Gaines. DCP. 18 min.
Beasts of the Southern Wild. 2012. USA. Directed by Benh Zeitlin. Screenplay by Lucy Alibar, Benh Zeitlin. With Quvenzhané Wallis, Dwight Henry. DCP. 92 min.
What else did the storm make possible? In Monique Walton’s slippery short film The Becoming Box, Donna Duplantier plays a grieving woman who, following the appearance of a mysterious box in her family’s backyard after Katrina, seems to become someone else. Simultaneously subverting and heightening the magical tropes of Black bayou life, Walton’s film explores the trickiness of grief, finding something like possibility—the ability to become—amid extraordinary loss.
Beasts of the Southern Wild, Benh Zeitlin’s unforgettable, fantastical tale of an adventurous little girl named Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis), remains notable for its evocation of Louisiana’s Terrebonne Parish and the small community, Isle de Jean Charles, that inspired the film’s setting (“the Bathtub”). This is a film about life under threat. A storm threatens, and with it, a devastating flood. Though not directly about Hurricane Katrina, the connection is inescapable, not least in the giant levees that eventually fail, sealing the Bathtub’s fate. The coming-of-age’s genre’s requisite sense of moral balance brushes against the realities of poverty and the threat of displacement, circumstances which, for Hushpuppy, function like a boon to the imagination, rather than a limit.