THE STARLING GIRL

By Laura PARMET

UNITED TALENT AGENCY (UTA) - as SALES

Drama - Completed 2022

Seventeen-year-old Jem Starling struggles with her place within her Christian fundamentalist community, but everything changes when her magnetic youth pastor Owen returns to their church.

Festivals
& Awards

Sundance Film Festival 2023
U.S. Dramatic Competition
    • Year of production
    • 2022
    • Genres
    • Drama
    • Countries
    • USA
    • Languages
    • ENGLISH
    • Duration
    • 113 mn
    • Director(s)
    • Laura PARMET
    • Synopsis
    • Seventeen-year-old Jem Starling struggles to define her place within her fundamentalist Christian community in rural Kentucky. Even her greatest joy — the church dance group — is tempered by worry that her love of dance is actually sinful, and she’s caught between a burgeoning awareness of her own sexuality and an instinctive resistance to her mom’s insistence that the time has come to begin courting. She finds respite from her confusion in the encouragement of her youth pastor Owen, who is likewise drawn to the blossoming Jem’s attention.

      Writer-director Laurel Parmet delicately balances the intoxication and inappropriateness of the pair’s transgressive connection in this morally complex, sensitive coming-of-age story. A stellar Eliza Scanlen beautifully conveys the impetuous, conflicted Jem’s tentative journey toward understanding her growingly complicated ideas about herself, her family, and the faith that has always guided her life. The Starling Girl centers on Jem’s agency as Scanlen and a gruffly charismatic Lewis Pullman generate a palpable chemistry, even as the film steadily reaffirms Jem’s youthful naivete and Owen’s position of authority.