Hey Hey It's Esther Blueburger (2008/2010)

Hey Hey It's Esther Blueburger

Danielle Catanzariti as Esther in HEY HEY IT'S ESTHER BLUEBURGER, a film by Cathy Randall. Released by Monterey Media.

Hey Hey It's Esther Blueburger Buy Poster

Starring:
And:
Director:
Screenwriter:
Producer:
Executive Producer:
Photography Director:
Production Designer:
Editor:
Costume Designer:
Music:
"The Only One" Composed by:
Distributor:

* Most external filmography links go to The Internet Movie Database.

Home/Social Media Links
Other Links

Also Known As: Hey, Hey, It's Esther Blueburger

Opened: 06/11/2010 Limited

Limited06/11/2010
Sunset 5/LA06/11/2010 - 06/17/20107 days
Laemmle's Town...06/11/2010 - 06/17/20107 days
DVD07/13/2010

Trailer: Click here to view at Apple Trailers

Genre: Australian Comedy/Drama

Rated: PG-13 for thematic elements, language, some sexual content and brief teen smoking

Short Synopsis

Hey, Hey It's Esther Blueburger is a hilarious coming of age comedy that explores what it's really like to be an outsider in your own world. Esther (newcomer DANIELLE CATANZARITI) is not like other girls; she befriends a duck, talks to God through the toilet and break-dances at her bat-mitzvah. Her school is a daily torment of mind-numbing conformity and bell-ringing rituals. Home is a pressure cooker driven by her mother Grace's (ESSIE DAVIS) demand for perfection. But life changes when Esther meets uber hip Sunni, (KEISHA CASTLE- HUGHES) and her off beat single mother Mary (TONI COLLETTE) and slips out of her oppressive all-girls private school and into a public one under the guise of a foreign exchange student. She learns that it's ok to be different and that being true to yourself is more important than fitting in.

Long Synopsis

HEY HEY IT'S ESTHER BLUEBURGER -- a smart, rueful and dead-on portrait of life's unending quest to fit in...and the girl who solves it by completely breaking out -- introduces a feisty outsider hero unlike any other seen on screen.

She is not remotely like your typical teenager.

And she is not trying to win a dance contest or navigate the drug world or vie for the love of some star athlete.

Instead, Esther Blueburger is seeking something far more ambitious, essential and exhilarating -- to defy the chaos, unfairness and absurdity of the world with her irresistible and indestructible urge to be herself.

Esther Blueburger's (DANIELLE CATANZARITI) quest begins when she escapes from her own Bat-Mitzvah party and is befriended by Sunni (KEISHA CASTLE-HUGHES), the effortlessly cool and fun girl who is everything Esther thinks she wants to be. With the help of Sunni, Esther goes AWOL from her ordinary life -- secretly busting out of her cold, repressive private school to clandestinely attend Sunni's edgy, forbidden public school as a Swedish exchange student.

Esther also leaves behind her blithely malfunctioning nuclear family -- her flummoxed mother Grace Blueburger (ESSIE DAVIS), her sentimental father Osmond Blueburger (RUSSELL DYKSTRA) and her mad genius twin brother Jacob Blueburger (CHRISTIAN BYERS) -- to hang out with Sunni's far breezier and super-hip single mom Mary (TONI COLLETTE).

Esther embraces her masquerade and enthusiastically crosses over into an alternate, new world in which everything in her life has become reversed. Once bullied, Esther is now in charge. Once the reject, Esther dives boldly into sexual experimentation. Once the angelic daughter, Esther defiantly shakes up her bewildered family.

But when one of Esther's two very disparate worlds is suddenly shattered, she must find a way to bring together all the conflicting dualities of her life -- public and private, real and fantastical, ugly and beautiful, the desire to be cool and the need to be loved -- while finally and fully embracing the wonderful weirdness and ecstatic bliss of being Esther Blueburger.

At once a sharp modern comedy about family and identity and a fable rife with incandescent memories of the perils of adolescence, HEY HEY IT'S ESTHER BLUEBURGER marks the feature debut of a fresh new voice Cathy Randall. The first time writer-director creates an original visual universe for Esther in which a series of unexpected occurrences that display the vivid essence of a skewed world in which this young heroine nevertheless finds a way to make the best of things in her evolving world. Esther may be able to transform her new high heel shoes into flashy ruby slippers with glue and red sequins, but she discovers that that it is not quite so easy to walk in them.

DVD

DVD

Amazon.com