Although it cost a fraction of the budget of "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," the Sundance entry “Beasts of the Southern Wild” may be the most evocative movie yet to have depicted the wrath of Hurricane Katrina. Rapturously greeted, the magical-realist drama won the Grand Jury Prize for the American dramatic competition at the independent film festival on Saturday. It's the first feature directed by Benh Zeitlin, a 29-year-old native of Queens and Hastings, New York. Ben Richardson, who shot the film, won the cinematography award.

Zeitlin and the playwright Lucy Alibar, who met at writing camp when they were adolescents, adapted the screenplay for “Beasts” from Alibar’s play “Juicy and Delicious.” The quasi-surreal survival allegory is narrated by its fierce six-year-old heroine, Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis), who lives in poverty with her terminally ill father (Dwight Henry) in a beleaguered community, “the Bathtub,” on a swampy South Louisiana island. To comprehend unfolding apocalyptic events (including charging aurochs and rising water), which she believes she has caused, Hushpuppy has to draw on her inner resources.

“The broader issue of the film is very much about how nature can take everything away from you,” said Zeitlin, the son of folklorists, who moved to New Orleans six months after Katrina struck and shot the likeminded 25-minute short “Glory at Sea” there. “All the apocalyptic landscapes actually exist in the world," he added. "You see where the land is falling off and turning into water. You see where the salt water is intruding onto the land and you see rows and rows of oak trees that look like skeletons.”

The project was developed at the Sundance Institute labs over the course of three years. A member of the grassroots filmmaking collective Court 13, Zeitlin holds to its philosophy of “living” a film as it’s being made. “Beasts” was made with a non-professional cast and a mostly non-professional crew. “We had 93 largely inexperienced, vastly under-equipped folks living at the bottom tip of America taking on the forces of nature to create this story,” he told Indiewire. “It was a true alternate reality with its own rules and code of behavior. My goal making films is to synthesize this alternate reality so many times that it actually exists.”

Quvenzhané was chosen to play Hushpuppy from 3,500 Louisiana children Zeitlin and his collaborators met with over the course of eight months. The process made them realize that their protagonist should be six years old, not eleven as originally intended, because of “the way her mind worked.”

“When [Quvenzhané] showed up for her callback – she was the first to come in – it was like this shocking thing [where] you see different children do a scene so many times and suddenly you’re, like, looking at a warrior in the part,” Zeitlin told the festival’s online channel. “You just have this moment of realization that this is your character, and it’s not at all who the character was and it’s not at all who you were imagining, but it’s so clear that it’s the spirit of the movie and the spirit of the part.”

“Beasts” was an instant hit at Sundance, sparking a bidding war for distribution rights. Fox Searchlight acquired it for a figure reportedly around the $2 million mark, beating out the Weinstein Company, Sony Pictures Classics, IFC, and Oscilloscope.

Given the film’s apparent strangeness and its mythological elements, Fox will need to promote it heavily. The distributor will also hope that national and daily reviews reiterate the praise poured on it at Sundance – for example, in Todd McCarthy’s rave in the Hollywood Reporter:

“One of the most striking films ever to debut at the Sundance Film Festival, ‘Beasts of the Southern Wild’ is a poetic evocation of an endangered way of life and a surging paean to human resilience and self-reliance. Shot along the southernmost fringes of Louisiana, cast with non-actors and absolutely teeming with creativity in every aspect of its being, Benh Zeitlin’s directorial debut could serve as a poster child for everything American independent cinema aspires to be but so seldom is.”

Almost as enthusiastic was Robert Levin of The Atlantic, who observed that “the film's careful injection of a warm, humanist spirit into an elaborate magical realist vision sets it apart. This is simultaneously a work of enormous vision and ambition, a thoroughly impractical moviemaking enterprise of extraordinary scale, and a love letter to the people of the Bayou State, who have persevered in the face of apocalyptic tragedy. Part ‘Tree of Life’ and part ‘Treme,’ it might not be the best film to come out of this year's Sundance Film Festival, but it's certain to be the most-remembered.”

As for Quvenzhané Wallis, she noted at the Sundance awards ceremony that she wants to be a movie star but has her third-grade studies to attend to first.

Below is a video of Zeitlin's 2008 short film "Glory at Sea," a precursor to "Beasts of the Southern Wild."