Coming to NYC’s Bronx Documentary Center tomorrow, Saturday, August 17: P-STAR RISING
Gabriel Noble’s portrait of a hip hop prodigy and her father debuted at Tribeca in 2009. It went on to an extensive festival run, including Hot Docs, Sheffield, Sarasota, Stockholm, Bergen, Zurich, Chicago Latino, and Heartland, among others.
In the early 1980s, a prison term cost Jesse Díaz his dreams of success at the dawn of hip hop. Decades later, broke, unemployed, and living in temporary housing, he struggles to support his family as a single father. Recognizing his youngest daughter’s musical talent, he aims to turn the precocious Priscilla into hip hop artist P-Star, “the youngest girl on the scene” – and the answer to his deferred dreams of stardom and wealth. Noble films the Díaz family over four years, capturing the fits and starts of P-Star’s career, its impact on her neglected older sister and on her own childhood, the fallout of their mother’s crack addiction, and strains between Jesse’s demands as a manager and his responsibilities as a father. The result is a surprisingly candid look at family dynamics in the face of ambition borne out of a mix of a father’s desperation, compensation, and love.
Note: The screening will include a Q&A with Gabriel Noble and the film’s protagonist, Priscilla Star Díaz.
what (not) to doc 