This year, instead of filling out that annual Oscar ballot for your office pool—which, lets face it, is always won by the person who never watches any of the movies—you should convince your co-workers to fill out an Independent Spirit Awards ballot. Your office will be the hippest on the block, and with my guide of winner predictions, you’ll finally be able to beat Henry from accounting. Plus, watching the Spirit Awards is infinitely more entertaining than the Academy Awards due to its layed back atmosphere and unstuffy attitude. In addition to my predictions below, I detail my reasoning for each category winner and also who to watch out for as a potential sleeper.

You can catch the Independent Spirit Awards live on IFC on Saturday, February 27, 2016 at 2:00 PM PT and see how accurate these predictions hold up.

2016 Independent Spirit Award Predictions

(Predicted winners are highlighted in red bolded font)

Anomalisa
Beasts of No Nation
Carol
Spotlight
Tangerine

Sean Baker – Tangerine
Cary Joji Fukunaga – Beasts of No Nation
Todd Haynes – Carol
Charlie Kaufman & Duke Johnson – Anomalisa
Tom McCarthy – Spotlight
David Robert Mitchell – It Follows

Charlie Kaufman – Anomalisa
Donald Margulies – The End of the Tour
Phyllis Nagy – Carol
Tom McCarthy & Josh Singer – Spotlight
S. Craig Zahler – Bone Tomahawk

Christopher Abbott – James White
Abraham Attah – Beasts of No Nation
Ben Mendelsohn – Mississippi Grind
Jason Segel – The End of the Tour
Koudous Seihon – Mediterranea

Cate Blanchett – Carol
Brie Larson – Room
Rooney Mara – Carol
Bel Powley – The Diary of a Teenage Girl
Kitana Kiki Rodriguez- Tangerine

Kevin Corrigan – Results
Paul Dano – Love & Mercy
Idris Elba – Beasts of No Nation
Richard Jenkins – Bone Tomahawk
Michael Shannon – 99 Homes

Robin Bartlett – H.
Marin Ireland – Glass Chin
Jennifer Jason Leigh – Anomalisa
Cynthia Nixon – James White
Mya Taylor – Tangerine

The Diary of a Teenage Girl
James White
Manos Sucia
Mediterranea
Songs My Brothers Taught Me

Jesse Andrews – Me and Earl and the Dying Girl
Jonas Carpignano – Mediterranea
Emma Donoghue – Room
Marielle Heller – The Diary of a Teenage Girl
John Magary, Russell Harbaugh, Myna Josep – The Mend

Cary Joji Fukunaga – Beasts of No Nation
Ed Lachman – Carol
Joshua James Richards – Songs My Brothers Taught Me
Michael Gioulakis – It Follows
Reed Morano – Meadowland

Embrace of the Serpent
Girlhood
Mustang
A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence
Son of Saul

Best of Enemies
Heart of a Dog
The Look of Silence
Meru
The Russian Woodpecker
(T)ERROR

Beasts of No Nation
Heaven Knows What
It Follows
Room
Spotlight

Advantageous
Christmas, Again
Heaven Knows What
Krisha
Out of My Hand

Cary Joji Fukunaga‘s Beasts of No Nation is easily available to millions right now via its juggernaut distributor, Netflix, and that’s a wonderful thing. The streaming platform can only, by its nature, provide a second-rate version of Fukunaga’s intended cinematic experience, however. Beasts is a stunningly presented film destined for not only big screens but for big, booming, very expensive speakers. Through the eyes of a child soldier named Agu (Abraham Attah), the film takes in all the sights and sounds of West Africa, its lush jungle foliage and teeming wildlife and the violent civil war that bloodies it.

We meet Agu in a happy place, wreaking innocent havoc across his little village with his friends and spending his nights bonding with his loving older brother. His world gets obliterated in a flash when militants ravage the village, separating him from his family for good. Before he has time to grieve a rebel leader called Commandant (Idris Elba) scoops him up and trains him to kill, Agu’s gradual, traumatic indoctrination by his new father figure informing the rest of the film. From child to killer, his innocence dies a slow death.

Sections of the film are hard to watch for their explicit, unflinching depictions of violence, particularly when Agu’s the one inflicting harm. We see death in front of our eyes, plain and simple, and it’s nauseating. War is an unfortunate reality for many in West Africa and Fukunaga’s truthful representation of its horrors is done out of respect for the real lives lost. The film isn’t merciless, though. Surrealist imagery comes into play when the violence ratchets up, softening the blow of the unspeakable acts Agu and the soldiers commit. During a brutal village raid scene Agu enters a state of half-hallucination, the greenery around him turning a bright crimson as gunfire rains.

The film is based on the 2005 novel of the same name by Uzodinma Iweala and examines the lives of child soldiers in grisly detail. The hardest-to-watch moment comes when Commandant demands Agu kill a man who claims to be an innocent bystander. The tragedy of Agu’s transformation is heartbreaking, but his internal struggle to retain some measure of morality gives us hope that goodness may endure. Voiceover work helps us keep track of Agu’s state of mind á la Terrence Malick, but his words never distance us from onscreen events.

Commandant doesn’t transform over the course of the story in the same way Agu does, but our perception of him does, his arc taking a similar shape to Agu’s only curved in the other direction. His thirsty obsession with power and dominance is ostensibly the hulking leader’s greatest strength, but when the tide goes out and fortunes are no longer in his favor, his true colors come into plain view.

Commandant’s seductive hold over Agu is shocking and unsettling, and yet it makes sense because Elba’s got the same hold on us. Elba’s a force of nature, imposing his will with his massive frame and booming voice. A back-heavy hairpiece makes him look like a silverback gorilla, his wide, wild eyes accentuating his animalistic appearance. The only thing more powerful than Elba’s performance is the energy he shares with Attah: their relationship, which drives the film, says more about the nature of manhood in one scene than other movies do in 90 minutes.

What’s most surprising about Beasts is how serene it can be despite the chaotic nature of its story. During his time with the rebels, Agu makes a friend, another boy named Strika (Emmanuel Nii Adom Quaye). Caught in the middle of a firefight, the rebels flee into the jungle. Looking back, Agu notices Strika huddled in front of a tree. He begs Strika to move his feet, but without a word, the cowering boy simply shakes his head slowly in solemn defeat. The moment struck me in an odd way that I can’t put my finger on, but I do know that it hit me deep; I’ve thought about it every day since I saw the film. Also, if you listen closely, you’ll notice the low hum of the teeming wildlife permeating almost every scene. The sound design is phenomenal, fully immersing you in Agu’s world without you even knowing it.

The film doesn’t depict a specific conflict (Agu’s village is fictional as are all of the characters), which liberates the story, creatively. Fukunaga clearly had no intentions of making Beasts political at all, instead fully concerning it with the psychological developments and complexities of its characters. It’s a one-hundred-percent humanistic, visceral story that transcends any issue or conflict you could read about in the news. Fukunaga’s found major success so far in his career—Sin Nombre, Jane Eyre and True Detective are uniformly excellent—but Beasts of No Nation is his finest work yet.

Cary Joji Fukunaga has been steadily building an amazing body of work in his young career. His films Sin Nombre and Jane Eyre earned him the admiration of film critics across the world, and True Detective (a series of which he directed every episode) earned him a rabid fanbase of binge-watchers.

With all eyes now on the Oakland-bred filmmaker, he brings us Beasts of No Nation, a stirring story about a child soldier in West Africa named Agu (Abraham Attah) who’s ushered into manhood by Commandant (Idris Elba), a charismatic rebel leader, after his family is killed in a military raid on his village. The film is stunningly presented with lush jungle imagery and brutally realistic scenes violence that rattle the soul. The observations made on the lives of child soldiers are shocking, but Fukunaga approaches the subject matter with respect and empathy.

I spoke to Fukunaga recently during his visit to San Francisco for the Mill Valley Film Festival. Beasts of No Nation is out in theaters and on Netflix today.

People are very excited about your work and are now following your career very closely. You’ve set the bar pretty high for yourself—your work’s been excellent so far. Is there a lot of pressure now that so many eyes are on you?

Cary: There’s definitely pressure in the sense that expectation is always a pressure. It’d be nice if for every film you made no one knew who you were, took your work at face value and didn’t compare it to Sin Nombre or Jane Eyre. But comparison is also nice in terms of the body of work and seeing how a film fits into it. I’m pretty critical of my own work anyway. No matter what a critic says, I have my own feelings on my work. As much as I want people to like the film, I also know for myself what I’m striving for.

So when people are talking about your movies and shows and you’re all over the Internet all the time, are you so preoccupied with your own critiques of your work that you almost don’t think about external opinion so much?

Cary: No one likes a bad review. Me and all my friends who make movies like to pretend like we don’t read reviews, but we know when people write bad things about our work. It doesn’t matter how many nice things people say about your stuff—as soon as you read something bad, that’s the thing you want to hone in on. You take it personally. It’s also the nature of making something for public consumption. You put yourself out there for critique and evaluation and you have to grow a thick skin, I suppose.

I think you’re improving as a filmmaker with every project. Beasts of No Nation has been gestating for several years now. Was there a point when you almost held off on making the film because you knew working on other things first would benefit the final product?

Cary: Had I made Beasts of No Nation in 2009 or 2010 when I was planning on making it originally, it certainly would have been a different film. There probably would have been aspects of it that would have been better or different depending on my development at the time. Had I made the film ten years from now, it’d probably be different as well. When you make a movie, for better or for worse, that’s what it is. It’s a reflection of your craft, your voice, whatever it is you’re interested in at the time. When you’re writing, you’re so sensitive to your environment. Any little thing can inspire you. Your radar is up and you’re more receptive to things, and that affects what you’re making.

I think Beasts‘ sound design is terrific.

Cary: The sound design was a challenge because we lost our production sound designer about a couple of weeks before we started to mix. We had to start over from square one. Glen [Payne], our sound editor, went to work day and night, trying to put together the sound design. I had a lot of ideas I wanted to try out. For me, sound design is almost if not more important than visuals. It’s part of my fear that when people don’t watch this film at the cinema they won’t experience the film as it was intended to be on an auditory level. If you watch it on your laptop or iPhone, you’re definitely not going to get the sound. The sound was designed to be completely immersive and bring people into that experience of a war itself. To hear those bullets whizzing by, to hear those call-outs, to hear the jungle and the animals—it all gets weaved into it.

I like how surreal the film gets. You seem pretty comfortable going surreal.

Cary: I think True Detective was the first time I ever used slow motion. We did a lot of slow motion, and I was concerned that we were maybe doing too much. There’s objective and inflective camerawork, observational versus when style is implemented for an effect. I’ve always stayed back from doing too much inflective camerawork in my earlier films. Because of the nature of the subject in Beasts, I think you have to be surreal at times, otherwise it’s too brutal. Surreality helps you to not only take in and observe reality, but also not turn off your receptibility to it.

I love the way Idris moves and leans into people and sticks his finger into Agu’s forehead. He’s very imposing.

Cary: A lot of that came from his hairpiece. We tried to figure out a look for him that he’d never done before so that he could really start to disappear into the character. We weren’t going to use prosthetics or anything like that, though Idris even considered something like that. I think the heat of the jungle turned us off from skin prosthetics.

Prosthetics for his face?

Cary: Yeah. We ended up just going with a hairpiece on the back that accentuates the crown of his head. It made him look more like a silverback gorilla. We liked that. The gorilla is a very evolved animal in the jungle. There’s something sympathetic about a gorilla but also something menacing. You want to befriend the gorilla, but there’s not doubt that he’s the king of his domain. I think Idris liked that as well, using a gorilla as a spirit animal.

I like that Commandant and Agu’s internal journeys go in almost opposite directions, with Agu gaining more agency and Commandant losing control.

Cary: That was by design. For me, it was like the death of a father. Agu sees Commandant as he really is. As the influence of drugs and the manipulation of power over Agu becomes less imprisoning, he’s able to find his own voice again. If it helps bring us to his character’s full circle, we need Commandant to fall somehow. Agu needs to see him for who he is. It is a sort of trading of places, isn’t it? But as long as Commandant is out there he has a chance of resurgence.

What was the most challenging day of shooting?

Cary: Every day. [laughs] Every day was so hard. It was a challenge, definitely. It felt like we were compromising ourselves and what we do. It was pretty hard to keep the morale up. For as many unlucky things that happened, there would always be something that’d happen after that that would just bring us right out of the muck. It was very much an up-and-down experience.

You’ve said that you actually enjoy working with children.

Cary: Yeah, I love working with kids. I’ve worked with kids on all my movies, pretty much. There’s something so special about getting a performance out of a kid that’s so unaffected. Abraham in particular is of an age group I’ve only worked with once, in Sin Nombre. It’s a really interesting moment in their time, which is between innocence and awareness. There’s a crossover there where the awareness will continue to grow and the innocence will diminish. If you can catch an actor who has the abilities Abraham has in that moment of time, you get interesting performances.

What’s special about Abraham? What did you see in him?

Cary: It was the observer in him. You could tell that he was a quick learner and that he was always watching. It’s those wheels turning on the inside that you’re looking for. So often you look at somebody and it seems like nothing is going on inside their brain. If you can find an actor with that has that internal life, you can leave that camera on them as long as you want and it’s going to be interesting.

A week has passed and I’m still right in the thick of the Mill Valley Film Festival, which so far has been the best I’ve attended to yet. The films have been mostly great and the vibe in Marin has stayed energetic (but not chaotic) since day one. I spent day seven, however, not in one of the festival’s designated theaters, but on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel, where I spoke to two directors whose films are wowing crowds at MVFF and are destined to be on myriad best-of-the-year lists for 2015.

Breaking Out

First up was a conversation with Room director Lenny Abrahamson, who the night before was presenting his film at MVFF with Brie Larson, who was receiving a Mill Valley Award. But he was a hair away from not making it to the event at all, he told me. “I was supposed to do the red carpet, present Brie with the award…everything,” the Irish filmmaker recalled. “There was an accident on the Golden Gate Bridge and we were stuck in traffic! I ran onstage in the middle of the Q&A.” Close call notwithstanding, the night went beautifully, with the typically receptive, inquisitive crowd of festivalgoers embracing the film fully, as have audiences across the country.

Based on Emma Donoghue’s best-selling novel of the same name (Donoghue adapted the story to screen herself), the movie follows the journey of a mother (Larson) and her son Jack (Jacob Tremblay), who plan to escape from Room, the only world Jack’s ever known and the tiny prison Ma’s been trapped in for years. Knowing nothing of the film going in, I had a fantastic experience as the story unfolded and surprised me several times before the end credits with thought-provoking revelations and unexpected narrative wrinkles. Larson gives perhaps her strongest performance yet (that’s saying something) and Tremblay’s no slouch, to put it lightly.

Abrahamson was tickled by the fact that I didn’t know anything about the film going in. “In an ideal world,” he said, “everybody would walk into the theater without knowing anything about the movie they’re going to see.” Our conversation (which you’ll find right here on WTI in its entirety next week) enrichened my viewpoints on the film and has me now eagerly waiting to watch it again, the filmmaker’s fresh insights in tow.

Bay Area Son Returns

Cary Joji Fukunaga‘s career is blossoming at a startling rate. After directing just a handful of projects, he’s become one of the most talked-about young directors in the game right now. The quality of his work speaks for itself and explains all the excitement: his first feature, Sin Nombre, won heaps of awards and praise on the awards circuit and with critics in 2009; his second, 2011’s Jane Eyre, again garnered him critical praise; and in 2014 he directed every episode of the gigantic hit series True Detective (Fukunaga declined a return to the series for season 2).

I met with Cary to talk about the film, which was a true pleasure (come back to Way Too Indie tomorrow to read our full conversation). Cary’s from Oakland, CA (an East Bay boy like me!). It’s always heartening to see someone from your neck of the woods make an impact in the film industry, and I predict we’ll be talking about Cary’s work for years to come. It was clear from talking to him that he’s a thinking man’s director.

Set in an unnamed West African country, the film charts the journey of Agu, a young boy who loses his family in a military raid on his village. Lost and grieving, he’s recruited by a roaming group of rebels led by Commandant (Idris Elba), a charismatic leader who turns Agu into an indoctrination pet project. Surreal, powerful, and visually breathtaking, Beasts is one of the best things I’ve seen all year and showcases Cary’s skills as both a writer and visual storyteller (for the film he acted as cinematographer for the first time in addition to his writer-director roles). Better yet, it’s available on Netflix tomorrow, October 16th. As I type this, Cary is heading to Mill Valley to present the film to lucky festivalgoers who are in for a soul-stirring treat.