Academy Award and Icon Award winner, Peter Capaldi, announces 'Starboy', directed by Joëlle Bentolila and produced by Tibo Travers, as the winner of Best Short Film at The British Short Film Awards 2021.


"Starboy - A young Hasidic man increasingly doubts his identity, his gender, and the nature of being as conflict between him and his pious young wife escalates - with shocking consequences."

London-based writer-director JOËLLE BENTOLILA has a number of short films, documentaries, and optioned or commissioned screenplays under her belt. In 2018, she received the UK Jewish Film / Pears Film Fund Award for her screenplay Starboy, the film subsequently winning the Best LGBTQ Short Award at HollyShorts 2019 and becoming a 2019 Iris Prize Best British Short Nominee. She has worked with notable producers in France, the UK and the US, is fascinated by stories about the mystery of the self and believes filmmaking is about truth, outrage, and excitement. Alongside a series of films and TV projects in development, she is an editor and a visual artist.

Directors Statement:
I wanted to make a film about the angst and dilemma of deeply religious people struggling with gender issues and nothing was more thought-provoking than setting the story in the gender-segregated, very isolated, Yiddish-speaking, ultra-Orthodox Jewish Hasidic community of London’s Stamford Hill.

My hope is that it'll help push that conversation forward.

So this is the story of a very religious, very spiritual young man who questions who he is, his gender, his essence - which triggers heart-wrenching conflicts with his very pious young wife and his religious surroundings.

And whilst his isolation and conditioning don’t stop him from rebelling and questioning what he is taught to believe, he still aspires to exist within the boundaries of the very restrictive community that is bound to reject him.

That’s his dilemma – a universal one: how to be true to oneself and remain a part of the only community one has ever known whilst in conflict with it? Is it even possible? It’s a challenge for those in the secular world and an even bigger challenge when someone is a member of a religious and closed community that will not accommodate such a disrupting change.

In portraying this young man’s conflict with himself and his young wife, I also wanted to explore the spiritual and mystical significance of gender identity by rooting it in the secrets of the Kabbalah and of Quantum physics, as the two are mysteriously linked by the effort to find the deeper truth that exists beneath our reality.

As this young religious man becomes obsessed by the Quantum theory of the wave-particle duality of light, he increasingly sees it as a symbol of his condition - a metaphor he identifies with in his quest to understand his own soul. Light becomes the answer he’s looking for.