I highly recommend Beasts of the Southern Wild.

It’s a rare film that takes the perspective of a child and treats it as a serious and valid viewpoint. Children after all are not automatons and many of them are smarter and more observant than most of the adults around them (I certainly was).

And it’s an even rarer film – even now – when that child whose viewpoint is adopted is not a boy.

Quvenzhané Wallis as Hushpuppy is amazing and fierce and yet vulnerable and precocious in a realistic way in the film. She really dominates the screen much as Elle Fanning did in Super 8.

And the film itself blends elements of magical realism with harsh reality in a way I’ve not seen before.

We live in times just as mythical and myth-filled as any. I don’t know if that’s the lesson the work was trying to impart, but that’s what I took from it. Very much worth watching.