It’s been seven years since Benh Zeitlin’s “Beasts Of The Southern Wild” was hailed at Cannes, Sundance and the Oscars. And yet, the 37-year-old filmmaker has kept a fairly low profile since then, working on a mysterious movie called “Wendy.” Production on “Wendy” began in March 2017 but now, more than two years later, it is finally ready.
“Wendy” test-screened on the West Coast this past summer, but it was a no-show at the fall festivals. Does this mean the film wasn’t submitted? Well, sort of. The gist of the matter is, according to a source at Fox Searchlight, Zeitlin’s picture was screened for and accepted by Toronto but decided to skip the fest after its writer-director decided to go back to the editing room. According to this same FSL source, the screening for TIFF was more courtesy for the friendship the studio has built with TIFF over the years than an actual “wanting-it to-be-screened” kinda thing.
Zeitlin’s confirmed last month that “Wendy” would be released on February 28th, 2020. The film is purported to be a re-imagining of the classic Peter Pan tale. Zeitlin’s film, which was co-written alongside younger sister Eliza Zeitlin, will now have a chance to premiere at Sundance in January, where Zeitlin’s previous film debuted and initially earned its acclaim. ’Beasts’ would end up getting an Oscar nomination for Best Picture.
The most complete description of what “Wendy” is about actually comes from Zeitlin himself in 2015:
"The new film is about a young girl who gets kidnapped onto a hidden ecosystem where a tribal war is raging over a form of pollen that breaks the relationship between aging and time," Zeitlin said at the time. Adding, "It follows a friendship-love story-adventure of her and a joyous, reckless, pleasure-mongering young boy as they swirl in and out of youth and as the ecosystem around them spirals toward destruction. We’re working on it all day every day, but as all psychotic adventures go, you know where your destination is but not how long it’s going to take to get there."
It does sound like the magical realism of “Beast of the Southern Wild” will be on full display in “Wendy.”