Brat summer is long over, and with the release of her mockumentary, “The Moment,” at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, the pop star has declared she’s ready to move on.
At a Q and A panel Friday night following the film’s world premiere, Sundance Film Festival Director Eugene Hernandez asked Charli XCX, who stars in the film and appears in two other Sundance films this year, what she’s thinking about this new moment, her turn to acting.
“Unlike the me in the film, I am sort of like, really wanting ‘brat’ to stop,” she said with a laugh. “And actually sort of like, really pivot as far away from it as possible, I think.”
Not because she doesn’t love “brat,” she said.
“I think for all of us as artists, you want to challenge yourself, and you want to totally switch the creative soup that you’re in and go and live in a different bowl for a while, or whatever, and just feel enriched by that,” she explained.
“The Moment” is a tongue-in-cheek mockumentary that follows Charli XCX through the aftermath of “brat summer,” the worldwide cultural phenomenon that surrounded the release of her sixth studio album, “brat,” whose iconic, slime-green cover became synonymous with the summer of 2024.
The film, based on an original idea by Charli, shows a fictive version of the artist as she becomes overwhelmed by the album’s success and the pressure to deliver an innovative world tour and concert film, to be directed by Johannes (Alexander Skarsgård), an interloping industry fixer brought in by Amazon to smooth out Charli’s coked-out, endless party-girl image in favor of something more family friendly. Drowning in the success of “brat,” Charli begins to fear the world moving on without her, and her resistance to an army of corporate meddlers erodes as she fumbles for her creative vision.
Hernandez asked Charli if she had specific experiences she was thinking about as she worked to portray a fictional version of herself.
“Well, I’m obviously quite related to my character, so I had a lot of inspiration to pull from,” Charli joked. “I would like to think I’m not as much of a nightmare as Charli in the film, but my real managers are in the audience, and they probably know the true answer to that, and I know that sometimes I do give them a bit of a hard time.”
She said the moments when her character spirals were familiar to her.
“I have been there,” she said. “I think I am, as an artist, quite a volatile person. I’m nice, though. I am quite nice, too. Right?” Charli asked, looking to director Aidain Zamiri.
“Yes, confirmed, yes,” he said.
“Too fucking right,” Charli said, flipping her hair.
Her character reflected on her experiences in the music industry since she started her career at 16, she said.
“I’ve gone through various different stages of my career where I felt on top of the world, where I felt like an absolute piece of shit on the ground, like, I’ve really gone through it all,” Charli said. “And I’ve also met different versions of all of the characters within this film. I’ve met the people who are truly rooting for you, riding for you no matter what, even if you are an asshole. I’ve met the people who are kind of in it to be close to the artist. I’ve met the sort of people who are so, like, ‘We totally get you,’ and they really don’t. I’ve met all of them … I’ve had a lot of practice reacting to all of those different kinds of characters in my real life.”
“The Moment” is director Aidan Zamiri’s feature debut, but he’s worked with Charli XCX before, including directing the music videos for “Guess” with Billie Eilish and “360,” one of the defining tracks on “brat.” The pair have known each other for a long time, he said.
“We’re in a really fortunate position that working with Charli means working with an artist who is incredibly honest about everything,” Zamiri said. “And it’s in her work and so obvious in her work, even then it’s still so incredible and surprising. She’s so willing to be so vulnerable and share so much in herself.”
The film balances Charli’s interiority as an artist with the outsider perspective of her work as a cultural moment, he said.
“Hopefully everyone can, in some way, find how it relates to them, and the terror of letting something go, even when you’re supposed to,” he said.
Hernandez joked that he’d heard someone refer to the film as “Spinal Brat,” a nod to Rob Reiner’s cult classic “Spinal Tap.” Zamiri laughed.
“You’re totally right,” Zamiri said. “I think this film wouldn’t exist without Rob Reiner and ‘Spinal Tap.’ … We had a really amazing plethora of films to draw from that were about something real, but not quite.”
He and co-writer Bertie Brandes drew from a lot of British comedy, too, Zamiri said.
“We’ve got some amazing British comedians in this film,” Zamiri said, “and we also wanted to combine those references with something that felt cool and fresh and sort of weird and also beautiful, we hope. So, really, finding that intersection, hopefully, gave it something new.”
Nearly the whole cast came out for the Q and A, including Skarsgard, Rachel Sennott, Hailey Gates, Kate Berlant, Alex Bake, Jamie Demetriou and Rosanna Arquette, who plays one of the music industry big wigs trying to influence Charli to make brat summer last forever. Charli had personally written her a letter asking her to be in the movie, she said.
“I do know a lot of music business executives and people who started off loving the artist, and then started becoming the bean counters of that dollars and cents and not really giving a shit about the artist, just wanting to get that money,” Arquette said.
With time for one audience question, Hernandez threw to a member of the crowd, who asked Charli, “Where do you find the time?”
“I don’t know. I just do. It’s like, when you love it, you do it, right?” the pop star said. “Don’t sleep, don’t eat, just do it on repeat.”