This Content - Babystar at TIFF 2025

Directed by: Joscha Bongard

Cast:  Maja Bons, Bea Brocks, Liliom Lewald

In the attention-based economy, this festival is a goldmine for content. If I could only post the right thing that lands on the right screen at the right time, it could jumpstart a whole dream career. Bless the algorithm. I posted a picture of myself on the public red carpet and one of Willem Dafoe at some party, and several people (who had ignored my messages for months) coincidentally decided I’m worth talking to now. Your content is all you are to some people.

German director Joscha Bongard’s debut feature Babystar is a psychological drama about a family of three influencers who post lifestyle content. Think morning yoga, food, hikes, and other stuff you mindlessly scroll through on your two-hour daily commute. 16-year-old Luca (Maja Bons) has had her whole life documented and monetized. She has one real friend, but her closest friend has been the cold eye of the camera. Luca’s parents decide to have another baby to create content with, causing her self-worth to crumble.

Babystar is an icy, slow burn of a film, albeit a little too slow for my Zoomer brain. I’m not the target audience. People who didn’t grow up with social media and are unfamiliar with the insidiousness of the content creation space should definitely see this movie. I remember DaddyOFive, a family vlog/prank YouTube channel where the parents were charged with child neglect in 2017. Babystar didn’t surprise me much. The film isn’t a satire but a reflection of a depressing reality, as AI-coded as this sentence may be. An AI company develops a chatbot with Luca’s voice and likeness, to which the real Luca confides. Not trying to be robophobic, but those scenes made me very sad. Maja Bons delivers a vivid, subtle performance of psychological decline. The scene where she tries and fails to genuinely connect with the hotel clerk (Maximilian Mundt) was so illuminating on how social media has disconnected people. Maja is a brilliant actress and certainly one to watch. And I’m not just saying that because I ran into her on the street. She even took a selfie with me, which I won’t be posting, out of respect to the film’s message.

One interesting aesthetic choice is how all of the brand names are bleeped out and pixelated. I guess that was done for copyright reasons or to comment on how homogenous modern life is. YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram all have similar content, now inundated with AI-generated slop. Prada and Gucci sell the same stuff with different logos. Maja told me that it was done to show how alien all those brands are to our language, but they are ubiquitous in capitalism. I always cringe when someone uses a brand as an adjective—definitely not a Gucci or Prada vibe. I wish the film had gone further into the satire territory, but real life already feels like a South Park episode. Our parents were right. It really was those damn phones.