Back to selection
Trailer Watch: Laurel Parmet’s The Starling Girl
The trailer has arrived for writer-director Laurel Parmet’s debut feature, The Starling Girl, which will have its limited theatrical release this spring. A favorite from this year’s Sundance Film Festival, the film follows 17-year-old Jem (Eliza Scanlen) as she tries to find her place within a fundamentalist Christian community in rural Kentucky.
In an intro ahead of his interview with Parmet and producer Kara Durrett out of Sundance, Erik Luers summed up the plot quite nicely:
Parmet first began writing the screenplay in 2017, soon after the premiere of one of her shorts and the wrap of another. Like her previous work, The Starling Girl positions the viewer within the complex perspective of a young woman, presented here with the additional weight of the societal expectations of a religious community. One afternoon after she is “politely shamed” (this is a town in which everyone kills with kindess) by a church member for her bra being visible through her shirt, Jem exits the party in tears and encounters pastor’s son Owen (Lewis Pullman), recently returned home from completing missionary work in Puerto Rico. Owen is in his late 20s and already with wife, but that doesn’t stop neither he nor Jem from connecting and eventually getting physically involved with one another, their sexual relationship conducted primarily in the backseat of a car in the woods.
The Starling Girl will release in select theaters on May 12 from Bleecker Street. Until then, you can read Parmet’s answer to our annual Sundance Question, as well as interviews we conducted out of the fest with the film’s cinematographer Brian Lannin and editor Sam Levy.
