Bleecker Street has acquired Laurel Parmet’s feature directorial debut “The Starling Girl,” which premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Last November, Parmet was named one of Variety‘s 10 Directors to Watch for 2023.

Bleecker Street will release the film theatrically later this year. The deal is for North American rights.

The drama follows 17-year-old Jem Starling (Eliza Scanlen), who struggles to find her place in the fundamentalist Christian community that raised her. According to the film’s official synopsis, “even her greatest joy — the church dance group — is tempered by worry that her love of dance is actually sinful, and she’s caught between a burgeoning awareness of her own sexuality and an instinctive resistance to her mom’s insistence that the time has come to begin courting. She finds respite from her confusion in the encouragement of her youth pastor Owen (Lewis Pullman), who is likewise drawn to the blossoming Jem’s attention.”