Kitty Green’s Casting JonBenet debuts on Netflix April 28
Netflix has today released the trailer for director Kitty Green’s Casting JonBenet. Check it out in the player below for a look at the sly and stylized exploration of the world’s most sensational child murder case. 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.
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Over 15 months, the filmmakers traveled 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 behavior of successive generations of parents and children.
“Kitty boldly embraces the tradition of innovative risk-taking within the documentary filmmaking mode with her remarkable work on ‘Casting JonBenet’,” said Netflix VP of Original Documentary Programming Lisa Nishimura earlier this year. “Netflix is the ideal home for showcasing Kitty’s sharply-rendered vision of a mythic American tragedy to a global audience, on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the crime.”
Green, who directed Ukraine is Not a Brothel and The Face of Ukraine: Casting Oksana Baiul (the latter of which premiered at Sundance in 2015 where it was awarded the short film non-fiction jury prize), is also producing alongside 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.
What do you think of the Casting JonBenet trailer? Will you check the film out when it hits Netflix in April? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
