INDEPENDENT LENS: P-Star Rising

At age nine, Priscilla, a precocious little girl, tells her single-father, Jesse, “I am going to become a rapper and fulfill your dreams of succeeding in the music business.” Moved by Priscilla’s, or P-Star’s, passion and impressed with her talent and charisma, he begins to teach her all he knows about rapping.

Suddenly, this father-daughter duo goes from a one-bedroom shelter in Harlem to a four-bedroom apartment, from food stamps to shopping sprees, from rapping on street corners to sold-out night clubs. But in the efforts to make her dad proud, Priscilla struggles to remain a child and finds herself trapped in a world of people twice her size and four times her age and doesn’t know whom to trust. The ride has just begun. By Gabriel Noble.

In this online interview, director Gabriel Noble talks about how he discovered P-Star in a New York nightclub and found himself filming her journey from a shelter to the doorstep of stardom.