Glory at sea!

26 MINUTES

After an apocalyptic storm, survivors band together on a surreal journey

When Beasts of the Southern Wild by the US director Benh Zeitlin was released in 2012, it was praised for its almost disorienting originality – a fully realised feature debut from a filmmaking wunderkind. But artistic success is, of course, rarely so sudden, tidy or meteoric. Before Beasts, there was Glory at Sea! (2008), a short directed by Zeitlin with a different plot, but sharing the same Louisiana Bayou-soaked magical realism, and similarly narrated from the perspective of a naive-yet-precocious young girl. And, like Beasts, it’s a film to which it’s tempting, but perhaps inaccurate, to pin the ‘auteur’ label, as both projects were grand collaborations with the Court 13 Arts collective that Zeitlin founded.

Viewed some 13 years later, Glory at Sea! becomes more than just a slice of contemporary indie-film history for the arthouse crowd. Its expressionistic atmosphere is almost instantly captivating, dropping audiences into the underwater wreckage of a great storm, where the dead float in a seeming state of purgatory. Above water, after a survivor washes up on shore, locals construct a ramshackle boat in hopes of reuniting with loved ones swallowed up by the ocean. There’s a deep poignance to the proceedings, reinforced by the proximity – in setting and in time – to Hurricane Katrina. Indeed, the cast was largely drawn from local and little-known actors still living in Louisiana in the wake of the storm.

That’s not to say that it’s a film consumed by suffering – there’s a sweetness and hope in it, too. It’s in the music, carried by a gorgeous recurring string theme, and punctuated by a brass band playing through the town’s ruins, conjuring the revelrous, triumphant spirit of New Orleans. It’s also in the narrative, which summons the prospect of perseverance through the storm. And it’s in the project itself, an audacious – and, yes, deeply original – work of art, built through community.

Written by Adam D’Arpino

Director: Benh Zeitlin

Producers: Dan Javney, Park Parekh, Josh Penn

Website: Court 13 Arts

Explore more

Illustration of a scoreboard at Barclays Center showing a man with raised arms, surrounded by an arena.

A dancing NBA superfan on the joy of spaces that let us go wild and get weird

Directed by Mickey Duzyj

Photo of a woman floating on their back in water with sunlight on their face and blurred foliage in the background.

Emotions aren’t reactions – they’re predictions we can learn to reshape

Video by The Well

Desert with a blurred yellow road sign and distant hills under a blue sky.
Psyche Exclusive

Ride along on a road trip suffused with LSD, petty theft and true love

Directed by Aric Allen

Sketch of a bathroom with a vanity unit and mirror. An illustrated nude woman stands in the centre, reflected in the mirror.

A woman summons a stoic calm after accidentally trapping herself in a shower

A film by Tom Schroeder

Two people in a park performing a balancing act on white chairs and a wooden plank, surrounded by pine trees.

Two gravity-defying performances play with the physics of life on Earth

A film by Bastien Dausse

Brightly coloured, psychedelic illustration of a boy in a field holding a prosthetic arm with a blue sky in the background.

A boy’s universe becomes strange and wondrous in this enchanting short

Directed by Gabriel Gabriel Garble

Illustration of a blue-colored woman balancing on one leg surrounded by plants, flowers, a crab, berries, mushrooms, and a turtle.
DANCE

Every culture dances. So why did humans evolve to get down?

Directed by Rosanna Wan and Andrew Khosravani

A painting of a pregnant woman with wide, dark eyes and scared face, holding a lit match. She wears a red dress with white polka dots.
POETRY

The unseen lives of others take centre stage in this surreal poetry adaptation

Directed by Michelle Kranot and Uri Kranot