They come to Los Angeles everyday, happily skipping, on their mothers’ arms (almost always), rehearsing their lines in the supermarket. They are seven- to seventeen-year-olds hailing from Mid West towns where nothing usually happens. Like everybody else, they want to get their piece of the cake, the sweet and spongy American dream. Sometimes pushing, sometimes reluctantly, their parents go after them, go to auditions, agents’ offices, film sets, and academies. They live in motel rooms or temporary apartments. Next explores the life of girls who want to be Hollywood stars.
Elia Urquiza (Pamplona, 1979). Elia made her first documentary, De Carmen a Carmen, within her Master’s Programme in Creative Documentary Film at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB). Since then, she has written, shot, and edited many films, often at the crossroads of documentary and fiction. In 2005, she took part in the group documentary project Entre el dictador y yo. In 2006, she paid tribute to two of her favourite directors, Victor Erice and Abbas Kiarostami, in Historia de un niño, shown in their exhibition at Barcelona’s Centre de Cultura Contemporània (CCCB). Granted a scholarship from Fundación “la Caixa” in 2007, she entered the Film Directing Programme at CalArts, the California Institute of the Arts, where she was able to tap into fiction film. In 2010, she got a grant from Navarra’s Government to complete here graduate studies in Los Angeles, under the tutorship of Monte Hellman.