Hamnet co-stars Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal are to reunite in Hold On To Your Angels, from writer-director Benh Zeitlin.
The US-set love story will be produced by Plan B and Rapt Film, and will be introduced at this week’s Cannes market by international seller The Veterans and domestic rights representative CAA Media Finance. Alex Coco will produce for Rapt.
Zeitlin, best known for 2012 Sundance Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic and Cannes Camera D’Or winner Beasts Of The Southern Wild, wrote the script and will direct.
Set set in South Louisiana, Hold On To Your Angels will see Mescal and Buckley (who won this year’s lead actress Oscar for Hamnet) playing, respectively, characters described as “a hell-bound outlaw and a ferocious shepherd of lost souls who fall in catastrophic love as their crumbling bayou paradise drags them under.”
Zeitlin commented: “Hold On To Your Angels is the most impossible love story I’ve ever witnessed — an outlaw romance for the end of America, set on the crumbling edge of South Louisiana. I’ve been dreaming of telling it since its hero, Pam Harper, walked into an audition for Beasts Of The Southern Wild seventeen years ago. It’s a love letter to an endangered way of life — and a rallying cry for empathy across a fractured planet.”
Coco added: “After years of working with filmmakers that explore the overlooked corners of our world, I can recognise Benh Zeitlin as a filmmaker with that rare gift: the ability to reveal profound beauty and humanity in parts of America that seldom find their way onto the silver screen.”
A statement from Plan B added: “Benh Zeitlin absolutely stunned us and the world at large with the cosmic sorcery of Beasts Of The Southern Wild. With Hold On To Your Angels, Benh has set his powerful mix of intense realism, myth and magic against the large scale of an epic love story. This is a writer-director with a vision for the ages and we could not be more proud to be by his side to make this film with Jessie and Paul.”
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