Jacob Bricca, Film Editor, Director & Teacher

Huge congratulations to three former students of mine, director Benh Zeitlin ’04 and Producers Dan Janvey ’06 and Michael Gottwald ’06, who have won this year’s Grand Jury Prize at Sundance for their film Beasts of the Southern Wild.    Fox Searchlight Pictures has acquired the film for distribution, and the film will likely arrive in theaters later this year.  The stories I’ve heard from the production of this film are epic, but I’m sure I haven’t heard the half of it.  In this little Sundance video, Benh describes auditioning 3500 children before they decided upon their 8 year-old lead Quvenzhane Wallis.  This sounds par for the course for a guy who lived in an abandoned squash court (thus the title of their production company “Court 13″) at Wesleyan for months in order to shoot the stop-motion sequences for the making of his thesis film Egg.