With filmmaker Joscha Bongard in person

The German Film Office is pleased to present a free screening of Babystar, the debut satirical drama by Face to Face with German Films ambassador Joscha Bongard. Q&A with Bongard to follow. Please register to attend.

On their account “our_bright_life”, Stella and Chris have documented their meteoric rise from childless couple to wealthy social media moguls, with their now sixteen-year-old daughter Luca as the star. Accustomed from her publicized birth to being in the limelight, Luca spends her life playing the online ambassador of her picture-perfect family, selling skincare products, ads, and a trained AI model of herself to fund their expensive lifestyle. 

When Stella and Chris raise the prospect of introducing a new baby sister into the fold, Luca’s world of appearances begins to crack. An emotional crisis begins, threatening not only her parents’ success, but her own self-understanding as both its envied producer and its suffocated product.
“Babystar encourages the viewer to see beyond the easy schadenfreude of watching this photogenic [family] eventually unravel—instead, the film wants us to examine the ways in which all families struggle to maintain a bond in our hyper-digital modern age.” —Tim Grierson, Screen Daily, 09/26/2025.

Babystar world premiered at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival. It was an official selection of the Hamburg Film Festival, the Cleveland International Film Festival, and the São Paulo International Film Festival, among others.

Babystar
Dir. Joscha Bongard
Germany, 2025
98 min.
With Maja Bons, Bea Brocks, Liliom Lewald


Joscha Bongard was born in Wolfsburg and grew up in Kassel. He worked as a production assistant at the Berlin-based production company Iconoclast Germany before entering the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg in 2017. His first feature-length documentary, Pornfluencer (2022), a portrait of a young amateur porn couple, premiered at DOK.fest Munich and was released in cinemas across Germany. Pornfluencer received extensive media coverage, was nominated for the German Documentary Film Award 2023, and sold to several territories. Babystar is his fiction feature debut.