Starring Maja

Maja, 18 years old, lives in a hopelessly backward little town in Sweden. Her one and only dream in life is to become an actress. She wants to be the centre of attention, for everyone to see the beautiful person she is on the inside. It’s just that that’s a little hard to see, since Maja is heavily overweight, clumsy and socially inept.

Erika Sohlman is a 28-year-old documentary filmmaker from Stockholm. When she meets Maja, she sees an excellent opportunity to create a tragicomic piece of entertainment at Maja’s expense. Happy to finally be getting the attention that she deserves, Maja gratefully embraces the opportunity to be on camera.

We get to accompany Maja as she struggles to realise her dream during her final term at high school, in part through Erika’s documentary viewfinder. It is a comic depiction with tragic elements. The prejudices you come up against when you have the ”wrong” appearance. The difficulty of finding your own identity when you are caught between a self-centred mother and an indifferent father. Her timid crush on Alex, a handsome and popular guy in her theatre class who is seemingly out of her league.

But during a trip to Stockholm, Maja discovers that even Alex harbours hidden secrets and disappointments…

Over time, Maja realises that Erika may be using her, and she has to ask herself if the attention is worth the price. Their roles are suddenly reversed when Maja realises that Erika needs her than she needs Erika. In the end, Maja finds the strength and self-assurance necessary to really take centre stage, on her own terms.

Teresa Fabik came up with the idea for STARRING MAJA a long time ago. Like the character in this film, she grew up with the feeling of being misunderstood, while at the same time dreaming about being loved and applauded.  But it was only now that she felt that the story was really ready for the big screen.

- STARRING MAJA is a bit of a classic Hollywood underdog story, says writer/director Teresa Fabik. It’s a modern-day fairytale about people and their dreams in a media-centric world. It’s a warm film that, while it may poke fun at certain aspects of human behaviour, always does so with affection. We used to sit and wait for a fairytale prince to come riding up on his white horse – now we wait for that fairytale production company to come along and put us in a reality show. An entire generation is growing up in the belief that if nobody sees you, you don’t exist. I feel that I can really stand up for this film one hundred percent.

Only 27 years old, Teresa Fabik debuted with the acclaimed teenage film Hip Hip Hora. Teresa describes her debut film as a good exercise, but that she since then has been longing to do a film where she’s really in charge.

-The producer Sandra Harms, who among other things was my assistant director on Hip Hip Hora, and I had long spoken about how we wanted to work together again. When the idea for STARRING MAJA came up we felt that it was the right time to collaborate.

Casting the lead role of Maja was one of the most important and most difficult aspects of the production. Of the two years she spent working on STARRING MAJA, Teresa devoted half of it trying to find the charismatic main character.

- Maja is a person who takes a lot of space, figuratively and socially. Apart from the fact that the actor had to have the right build, she had to also be able to perform on stage since that’s what Maja does in the film. She had to be very charismatic since she appears in almost every single scene. We looked everywhere, on the street, via local newspapers, open auditions in a dozen different cities, until we finally found the natural talent Zandra Andersson and we could begin shooting, she said.