Casting JonBenet
One of the only films we gave five-stars to at the Berlin Film Festival back in February was the brilliant Casting JonBenet, the docu-drama that examines the unsolved murder of six-year-old JonBenet Ramsay. Kitty Green directs this well-crafted feature, which hits the streaming service from April.
The film is a sly and stylized exploration of the world’s most sensational child-murder case, today. The still unsolved death of six-year-old American beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey has inspired years of media speculation and public fascination, and in Green’s film, audiences are presented with a documentary hybrid examining the macabre legacy of this tiny starlet.
Over 15 months, the filmmakers travelled to the Ramseys’ Colorado hometown to elicit responses, reflections and even performances from the local community. In doing so, Casting JonBenet examines how this crime and its resulting mythologies have shaped the attitudes and behaviour of successive generations of parents and children.
Produced by Green (Ukraine is Not a Brothel; and The Face of Ukraine: Casting Oksana Baiul, which premiered at Sundance in 2015 where it was awarded the short film non-fiction jury prize), Scott Macaulay (Raising Victor Vargas; Gummo) and James Schamus (Brokeback Mountain; The Ice Storm), the film was financed by Meridian Entertainment through its production deal with Schamus’s Symbolic Exchange, with additional support from Screen Australia, Film Victoria, the Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program, Cinereach, Rooftop Films and Garbo NYC. Casting JonBenet is a Forensic Films/Matricide Pictures/Symbolic Exchange production.
Watch the new trailer for Casting JonBenet in the player below, and check out our full review of the film over here. The film releases on Netflix on April 28th, 2017.
