Babystar

What is it like to grow up with your own life shared on social media from the moment you are born? Babystar is a wise and incisive portrayal of a teenager who begins to question her influencer family’s seemingly perfect life. This visually striking feature debut is a shrewd satire of self-presentation, digital and familial dependence, and the question of who really owns our lives.

Ever since her first ultrasound image as an unborn baby, 16-year-old Luca has been an internet star, living an apparently idyllic life of luxury with a perfect family. Her parents, Stella and Chris, run a lucrative family channel and create lifestyle content for millions of followers. For Luca, pressure to meet expectations, self-optimization and marketing are such commonplace parts of life that she barely notices the boundary between “online” and “offline”. Only when she learns that her parents want another child does the family’s perfectly constructed façade begin to crack. For the first time, Luca questions—and begins to sabotage—her own life and the family’s financial and emotional dependencies.

Filmmaker Joscha Bongard (born in 1994 in Wolfsburg) has firsthand experience behind the scenes of the YouTube and advertising industries. In his feature debut, the documentary Pornfluencer, he also explored themes of self-presentation and self-exploitation in the digital age. Babystar is his graduation film. The film had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2025, one of the world’s most important film festivals.