After its successful première at the Sundance Film Festival, American film director Martha Stephens' film To the Stars has headed off to the Official Selection of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. This black-and-white film, set in the 1960s in Oklahoma, has already grabbed the American film critics' attention. For example, The Hollywood Reporter speaks about the "strong emotional undertow" and The Movie Cricket about the "fantastic cast".
We find ourselves with the young Iris on a small Oklahoma farm. Iris wears glasses and has an out-of-date hairdo and incontinence problems, features that don't help to make her very popular among her classmates. However, everything changes when the enigmatic Maggie arrives in town. She claims that her father photographs celebrities for Life Magazine and that she already has a job as an air hostess lined up for her. Maggie doesn't make friends with the stuck-up stars of the class as one would expect but, of all people, with the taciturn Iris. The question is which of the two girls is in more urgent need of help.
"The main characters in my film seem to get lost in the mist of their own desires," says the director Martha Stephens. "Maggie yearns to be accepted for who she is, but at the same time she wants to be a model daughter and live up to her parents' expectations. Iris, on the other hand, is on the lookout for another world, the one she hears about when she secretly listens to her radio under her duvet at night," the director said of this film about growing up and emancipation, which besides all else is beautiful to watch, its black-and-white emphasising the stunning light.
