VOX LUX

An unusual set of circumstances brings unexpected success to a pop star.

Cast: Natalie Portman, Willem Dafoe, Jude Law
Director: Brady Corbet
Genre: Drama, Music
Running Time: 110 minutes

Synopsis: Celeste (Raffey Cassidy) is a teenage music prodigy whose talent shines through during a memorial service when she sings a song that touches the hearts of mourners. Guided by her sister (Stacy Martin) and a talent manager (Jude Law), Celeste's meteoric rise to fame dovetails with a shattering terrorist attack on the nation, elevating her to a new kind of celebrity: American icon, secular deity, global superstar.

Eighteen years later, Celeste (Natalie Portman) finds herself on the comeback trail when a scandal, personal struggles and the pitfalls of fame threaten her career.

Featuring original songs by Sia and a transcendent performance by Natalie Portman, VOX LUX is an origin story about the forces that shape us, as individuals, nations, and gods.

VOX LUX
Release Date: February 21st, 2019

Director's Statement – Brady Corbet

My previous film, The Childhood of a Leader, was set in Europe in the early part of the 20th century. It examined key events that would go on, often inadvertently, to define the era. It featured a young protagonist who was witness to the atrocities of an epoch, only to become a cause of them for the next. The film was inspired by the revisionist histories of Robert Musil and WG Sebald " labyrinthine constructs that imagine fictional characters as eyewitnesses of crucial historical turning-points, or reallife personages placed in altered historical settings. For me, these stories demonstrate a more transparent contract with the reader than the traditional historical biography because one can access the past without questioning the author about how they could provide such a detailed account of an event without having been present for the event themselves. Or if they had been present, in the case of a memoir, has their memory of past experiences not betrayed them?

Vox Lux is the continuation of that theme but on the other side of the century: an historical melodrama set in America between 1999 and 2017. Its protagonist is a pop star called Celeste and it chronicles key events and cultural patterns that have so far defined the early 21st century via her gaze.

VOX LUX
Release Date: February 21st, 2019