Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields

Details:

Release:

Two-Part Documentary
2023, 2x70 min parts

Role:

Director

Synopsis:

Brooke Shields, ’80s icon and household name, was a child model before she came to prominence in Louis Malle’s controversial film Pretty Baby at age 12. With a series of provocative Calvin Klein jeans ads and leading roles in 1980s teensploitation hits The Blue Lagoon and Endless Love, Shields’ early career was defined by a sexuality that she could neither claim nor comprehend.

In this two-part documentary, director Lana Wilson (Miss Americana, 2020 Sundance Film Festival) reveals Shields’ story through media appearances and archival footage, bringing full context to the time when Shields was coming of age in public. Wilson creates space for the adult Shields to share her intelligence, vulnerability, and humanity while reflecting on her career and life, including her complex relationship with her mother, Teri, her marriage to Andre Agassi, and her own struggles with motherhood. Honest and incisive, Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields critiques a toxic culture and power structure that perpetuates misogyny and is complicit in the sexualization and objectification of young girls. But, above all, it tells the moving story of Brooke Shields discovering and embracing her own identity and agency. - Sundance Film Festival

Press:

CRITIC’S PICK. Absorbing…a biography of Shields with lucid insights into the culture that shaped her. Builds a mood of reminiscence gone rancid, and suggests a generation of women transformed by the prototypes society boxed them into.

Natalia Winkelman, The New York Times

Supremely well-crafted. A documentary of fascinating depth that holds our voyeuristic image culture up to the light. Lana Wilson's accomplished film traces how Brooke Shields' career was at the forefront of our culture's sexualization of girls, and shows what it was like for her to live a life inside that image.

Owen Gleiberman, Variety

Extraordinary.

Marlow Stern, Rolling Stone

Intimate and unflinching.

Katey Rich, Vanity Fair

The ultimately affirming story of a woman who took back her life.

LANA WILSON