Exploring Joscha Bongard's Babystar: AI, Family, and Capitalism

By Genevieve Dammery

We had the chance to sit down this week with writer and director Joscha Bongard to discuss his latest film Babystar, AI, family influencers and late-stage capitalism. WARNING: this interview contains spoilers for Babystar.

CUC: Joscha, thanks so much for chatting with us at Close-Up Culture. Could you start by telling me a bit about the inspiration for the film?

JB: The initial idea came to me when I was working on a documentary, and I had the idea of a child who sues theirparents because they were put on social media by them. I have a background in YouTube because I worked for YouTube Management 10 years ago, during this gold rush in Germany when very young people became very rich out of it.

I really wanted to tell a story about families and about how the dreams and untold dreams of parents live on in their children.I’m really happy that we did a deep dive into it. For the storyline we found so many things online, and we picked stuff from videos and placed it into the story. It was really a documentary approach to [making] the film.

CUC: Why was it important to you that in telling this story, Luca’s exploitation comes from her family and not just from people online?

JB: Yeah, I mean this might also come from the documentary I was working on because this was about a porn couple, a very young one, and their relationship, and this relationship was very exploitative. He was really pushy and had all the red flags a man could have, and she really fell for him, and this left a great impression on me. When I thought about family, I thought about how many manipulative parents there are in our world, and how in our times we really try to capitalise on every relation we have. I switched from [writing about] capitalising your sex life to [writing about] capitalising your child.

CUC: When you were doing research for this film, did you find yourself feeling more sympathetic to the people who were putting their kids online?

JB: I really don’t like to judge people because in the end, it’s a systemic problem. Nowadays it feels easier to show your whole life online and really capitalise on everything you are doing, rather than two people going to a normal job and bringing home a good wage to feed their children. If both parents work, they don’t see their children, but if you do social media, you are together, you can enjoy life. It’s tempting. And the problem is that we are too focused on becoming rich and enjoying luxury and just living a decent life. These are mostly systematic problems which we see with late-stage capitalism. I really don’t hate these people who are showing their children online because in the end they are also victims of the system. Obviously, I always want to protect the children more than parents, and nowadays we are discussing bans of social media. I don’t like bans, but it’s a good idea to really give back childhood to our children instead of just living online. But I don’t think like children are the only ones having problems with social media. It’s also all the 50-year-old people who don’t really know what they are watching, and how they get influenced by it. It’s bigger than just watching videos online.

CUC: It absolutely is. You mentioned late-stage capitalism and one thing that was so interesting watching the film is the way you have blurred out all the branding throughout. I’d love to hear a little bit more about how you came up with that.

JB: Obviously, we needed a lot of platforms and brands in this film because everything on social media is paid for by brands or platforms, and platforms are profiting from it. Making small films [like ours], you are not allowed to get in trouble with big brands or platforms, so we needed to find a clever way to work around it. I did a lot of blurring in my documentary because we also showed videos from pickup artists who didn’t want to be in our film. And when we blurred their faces, I found it even more interesting to watch them, and so I had this idea and transformed it into Babystar. If you blur stuff, people really get pinpointed to it and really see it. If you watch normal films, you don’t even see how many product placements are in them.

CUC: How much of Luca’s rebellion throughout the film is just another performance for her?

JB: That’s a very interesting question. If you grow up and your life is a whole performance, you really don’t learn how to be without a mask. Part of this rebellion is performative, but she tries to get real connection and then she fails again because being performative or getting recognition is more important to her than being herself. So yeah, I think in the end she finds something which is not performative.

CUC: My heart broke for Luca’s character watching her. What did you want the ending of the film to leave viewers thinking and feeling?

JB: The ending was there from the very beginning. Luca leaving [her parent’s house] was in the first draft, and you can read the ending in two ways. You can either think that she really manages to get away, or you can be more realistic and think about how far a young woman with a toddler can go. I didn’t want to be cynical in the end; I wanted to leave a bit of hope in there. I think that’s really important. We stay hopeful because if we are not hopeful anymore, we are not human anymore. [If we give up hope] we can call it a day and give everything to AI and just see the world end.

CUC: Yeah, I’ll ask about AI because this is another interesting part of the film. What do you think that AI kind of adds to the film’s ideas around identity and commodification? And why did you want to include that in the narrative?

JB: Yeah, I mean it’s interesting because when we imagined this AI avatar back in 2023, it felt like sci-fi, but the AI industry moved so fast that when the film came out it was completely normal to talk to avatars. Nowadays, 80% of our young people are talking to AI about their deepest problems. This became reality quicker than we thought. Back then there were apps like Replika, that’s also where the idea came from.

It’s very interesting to think about how AI will change how we communicate. I think it is already changing how we solveproblems. Starting with Google for example, we don’t call our parents with questions how we do laundry, now you just ask Claude. It’s scary, but in AI there’s also a lot of hope, and we can we can really find good solutions for problems. But what I really fear is if we don’t have rules for it, and we just let it go.

CUC: And finally, what’s next for you? What can we expect to see? This is such an exciting film, so I can’t wait to see what you do next.

JB: Thank you. I’m shooting a series at the moment in Germany, which is a comedy. It’s called Doppelhaushälfte, which translates to Duplex. It’s about two families living next to each other, and they are very different, and it’s quite fun to explore television. And I’m currently writing my next feature film, which is a love story which turns into a body horror, and centres around pregnancy, abortion, and parenthood.

CUC: Wow, that’s so exciting. It sounds like you have some incredible stuff coming up! Thanks so much for chatting to us.

You can read our review of Babystar here.