Streaming giant Netflix has acquired the rights to director Kitty Green’s documentary “Casting JonBenet” before its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival this month.
“Casting JonBenet” is “a 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,” the official synopsis reads. “After years of media speculation and public fascination, audiences are presented with a documentary hybrid examining the macabre legacy of this tiny starlet. 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.”
Green has made waves at Sundance before. In 2015, her short “The Face of Ukraine: Casting Oksana Baiul” was awarded the short film non-fiction jury prize.
“Kitty boldly embraces the tradition of innovative risk-taking within the documentary filmmaking mode with her remarkable work on ‘Casting JonBenet,’” Netflix VP of Original Documentary Programming Lisa Nishimura said. “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.”
“Casting JonBenet” is one of the six out of sixteen films in Sundance’s U.S. documentary competition section directed by women. It’s also set to screen at the Berlin International Film Festival in February. “Casting JonBenet” will launch on Netflix and in limited theatrical release in spring of 2017.
