Academy Award winner Jessie Buckley and nominee Paul Mescal, the stars of Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, are reuniting in Hold on to Your Angels, written and to be directed by Oscar-nominated filmmaker Benh Zeitlin (Beasts of The Southern Wild).
Plan B (Moonlight) will produce with Alex Coco (Anora) under his Rapt Film banner with production due to begin in February 2027. The Veterans is handling international sales, with domestic distribution rights represented by CAA Media Finance.
The hot project will be introduced to buyers at this month’s Cannes market where there’s every chance a studio takes it off the table. Some are surprised it hasn’t been already.
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Set on the edge of South Louisiana, Hold on to Your Angels “follows a hell-bound outlaw (Mescal) and a ferocious shepherd of lost souls (Buckley) who fall in catastrophic love as their crumbling bayou paradise drags them under.”
Buckley won the Best Actress Oscar for last year’s Hamnet, and Mescal scored an Lead Actor Academy Award nom for 2022’s Aftersun.
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“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,” said Zeitlin. “I’ve been dreaming of telling it since its hero, Pam Harper, walked into an audition for Beasts of the Southern Wild 17 years ago. It’s a love letter to an endangered way of life — and a rallying cry for empathy across a fractured planet.”
Added Plan B: “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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Commented Coco: “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.”
Buckley is represented by CAA, United Agents and Johnson Shapiro Slewett & Kole; Mescal by CAA and Curtis Brown Group; and Zeitlin by CAA and Gang Tyre.
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