Casting JonBenet - Documentary

[wilder]

A sly and stylized exploration of the sensational murder of the six-year-old beauty queen, which remains unsolved after two decades. Over 15 months, the filmmakers traveled to the Ramseys' Colorado hometown to audition local actors, unpacking how each remembers and relates to the ill-fated Ramsey family. The film examines how the crime and its resulting mythologies have shaped the attitudes and behavior of successive generations of parents and children.

Directed by Kitty Green
Release Date - April 28, 2017 on Netflix

[wilder]

This was secretly directed by Christopher Guest.

Instead of another investigation of a murder case that was a big deal in the american media for a long time, we get a deconstruction of how people empathize and relate to other peoples real-life tragedies, especially as actors. We see how people try to wrap their minds around a situation where a lot of information is missing. We see how people bring in their own experiences and tragedies into their attempts to get what was going on in the heads of the people affected.

Green films in Boulder, Colorado, where Ramsey was killed, on Christmas night in 1996, on the pretext of making a dramatization of the story, and collects actors who live in the area. The actors being auditioned only occasionally perform lines or scenes from the script; instead, they speak to Green about the case, about their personal connections to it, about their speculations regarding it. But in the urgency of selling themselves to Green for the coveted roles, they divulge painfully intimate stories in the hope of establishing the bona fides of their emotional connection to the character they'd be playing. (One discusses the murder of her brother; another speaks of her mother's diagnosis with borderline-personality disorder; another talks of the trauma of waking up to find his girlfriend dead in bed beside him; one mentions his son's legal issues; and yet another discusses his own imprisonment.)

[jenkins]

wanna see it