Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley reunite for Benh Zeitlin's 'Hold On to Your Angels

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.”

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