Film - Vox Lux

With Natalie Portman being tipped for an Oscar for this performance, watch the trailer for Vox Lux...

Press Release

In 1999, teenage Celeste (Raffey Cassidy) survives a violent tragedy. After singing at a memorial service, Celeste transforms into a burgeoning pop star with the help of her songwriter sister (Stacy Martin) and a talent manager (Jude Law). Celeste's meteoric rise to fame and concurrent loss of innocence dovetails with a shattering terrorist attack on the nation, elevating the young powerhouse to a new kind of celebrity: American icon, secular deity, global superstar.

By 2017, adult Celeste (Natalie Portman) is mounting a comeback after a scandalous incident that derailed her career. Touring in support of her sixth album, a compendium of sci-fi anthems entitled “Vox Lux,” the indomitable, foul-mouthed pop savior must overcome her personal and familial struggles to navigate motherhood, madness and monolithic fame in the Age of Terror.

In Brady Corbet's second feature, following his 2015 breakout debut The Childhood of a Leader— winner of the Best Director and Best Debut Film prizes at the Venice Film Festival — Celeste becomes a symbol of the cult of celebrity and the media machine in all its guts, grit and glory.

Brady Corbet, who both wrote and directed the film, explained how his inspiration for Vox Lux sprang from his debut film, saying "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 is able to 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."

Featuring original songs by Sia, an original score by Scott Walker, and a transcendent performance by Natalie Portman, personifying and pummeling the zeitgeist, Vox Lux is an origin story about the forces that shape us, as individuals, nations, and gods.

Coming to select big screens in the US from Friday and across the country on 14th, Vox Lux will hit UK shores next year after its success at London Film Festival.



Vox Lux is financed and produced by Bold Films and Andrew Lauren Productions (ALP), written and directed by Brady Corbet. ALP’s Andrew Lauren and D.J. Gugenheim are producers along with Killer Films’ Christine Vachon and David Hinojosa, Bold Films’ Michel Litvak, Gary Michael Walters, David Litvak and Svetlana Metkina and Brian Young from Three Six Zero Entertainment and Robert Salerno. Portman and Law are executive producers along with Sia.

Image - Official website