Skip The Hunger Games and watch this film! This movie shares similar themes with The Beasts of the Southern Wild, which is set in New Orleans and made by a young male New Yorker. Winter’s Bone is set in the Ozarks and made by a Cambridge born woman. Both films deal with the denouement of a long-standing crisis, the final failure of the father/men to provide for his family, specifically his daughter, how that failure is reflected in the destruction of the community and the larger environment and how the daughter must defy all odds to survive in the primitive environment. Both films are made by outsiders. How come only outsiders are trying to capture a world within our nation, but that world is more foreign to us? Is it perhaps because only an outsider would see the contrast and be able to portray it unflinchingly in both its positive and negative lights. What do the members of the depicted community think of the film? Where Winter’s Bone departs from The Beasts of the Southern Wild is by explicitly focusing on gender issues & roles without the filter of idealized and nostalgic femininity. One of the few films that completely got my attention.