Fresh off their acclaimed performance together in Chloe Zhao’s “Hamnet,” Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal are set to reunite in “Hold On to Your Angels,” a tragic romance from “Beasts of the Southern Wild” director Benh Zeitlin and being packaged for next week’s Cannes film market.
Brad Pitt and Dede Gardner’s Plan B will produce alongside Alex Coco, who produced Sean Baker’s Oscar-winning “Anora” and is attached through his Rapt Film banner. The Veterans is handling international sales, with domestic distribution rights represented by CAA Media Finance. Production is set to begin in February.
Zeitlin describes the film as “an outlaw romance for the end of America, set on the crumbling edge of South Louisiana.” Mescal will play that outlaw, who forms a catastrophic romance with a “ferocious shepherd of lost souls,” played by Buckley, as their crumbling bayou paradise drags them under.
“’Hold On To Your Angels’ is the most impossible love story I’ve ever witnessed,” said Zeitlin. “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.”
“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,” said Plan B.
“After years of working with filmmakers that explore the overlooked corners of our world, I can recognize 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,” added Coco.
Mescal and Buckley received critical acclaim for their work in “Hamnet” as famed playwright William Shakespeare and his wife, Agnes, who must endure the untimely loss of their son, Hamnet. Buckley received the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in the film, while Mescal was nominated for Best Supporting Actor.
Buckley is represented by CAA, United Agents, and Johnson Shapiro Slewett & Kole; Mescal by CAA and Curtis Brown Group; Zeitlin by CAA and Lichter, Grossman, Nichols, Feldman, Rogal, Shikora & Clark.
