His debut film, the environmental fantasy Beasts of the Southern Wild, wowed critics and picked up four Oscar nominations with its offbeat, freeform vision of a young girl's fight for survival down on the flood-threatened Louisiana bayou. Now Benh Zeitlin has revealed the synopsis for his next film, and there's no sign of a segue into bland orthodoxy.

Speaking to the New York Times, Zeitlin said the new movie would be about a young girl "who gets kidnapped on to a hidden ecosystem, where a tribal war is raging over a form of pollen that breaks the relationship between ageing and time".

He added: "It follows a friendship-love story-adventure of her and a joyous, reckless, pleasure-mongering young boy as they swirl in and out of youth and as the ecosystem around them spirals towards destruction. We're working on it all day, every day, but as all psychotic adventures go, you know where your destination is but not how long it's going to take to get there."

Zeitlin, whose debut received nominations for best film, best actress (for Quvenzhané Wallis), best director and best adapted screenplay (for Zeitlin and Lucy Alibar), revealed the follow-up would benefit from a development deal which, along with a couple of prizes, had helped put him "above the poverty line for the first time since I got out of college". Beasts of the Southern Wild was shot for just $1.3m with Wallis, an untrained child actor, and local baker Henry, who had never acted before, in the role of her father. Zeitlin said the film's success meant his production company also now had offices for the first time.

The director's follow-up is as-yet unnamed and there are no cast details, though the role of the kidnapped young girl might easily have been written for Wallis. She will, however, most likely first appear in the forthcoming remake of Annie, which is set for a 2014 release.

• Watch our video review of Beasts of the Southern Wild
• Dwight Henry: from New Orleans baker to Hollywood's rising star