Twenty years after the brutal murder of a six-year-old, Kitty Green’s inventive film examines the story from a new angle

Casting JonBenét director on our obsession with the murder of a child pageant queen

1996 was the year the Spice Girls broke, the “Unabomber” was arrested, 35 people were massacred at Port Arthur in Tasmania, Lance Armstrong got cancer and John Howard defeated Paul Keating to become Australia’s 25th Prime Minister.



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It was also the year a little girl named JonBenét Ramsey was found dead in her family home on Boxing Day, in the picturesque American town of Boulder, Colorado.

Reported kidnapped then discovered brutally killed, the case was one of the first to be swallowed whole by the burgeoning 24-hour news cycle, accelerating daily due to cable TV, newly-minted home internet access, and a tabloid media baying for fresh blood after the sensational OJ Simpson case.

With a six-year-old pageant queen at its core, and a family more willing to talk to media than police, it was the case that changed everything: David Lynch’s Twin Peaks manifested in real life.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest JonBenét Ramsey, the Little Miss Colorado winner who was murdered in 1996. Photograph: Sipa Press/REX/Shutterstock

Australian filmmaker Kitty Green was 12. She spent hours watching the bizarre true crime case unfurl into public obsession.

“It was our summer holidays, but [in America] it was Christmas,” she tells me at Berlinale, where her innovative “documentary hybrid” Casting JonBenét recently screened.

“So we had the whole month of January [free]. And we would just watch TV in the morning and see it all play out.”

The story left its mark, and stuck. But why? “It’s been 20 years since it happened and yet it’s still on the front cover of the tabloid magazines,” Green says. “I was fascinated by the cultural obsession, and why we can’t let that story go. I really think it’s a family story, something we can all relate to.”

Green’s formative films had garnered praise at high profile festivals, including feature documentary Ukraine Is Not A Brothel (2013) and The Face of Ukraine: Casting Oksana Baiul – the short film which became a blueprint for Casting JonBenét’s powerful “casting call confessional” format. As the 20th anniversary of the case loomed, Green decided to try to make a film about it. With the help of two indie film heavy-hitters – producers Scott Macaulay (Gummo) and James Schamus (Brokeback Mountain) – it became a reality.

Casting JonBenét is no midday movie. Nor is it a click-bait, quasi-forensic ratings-grabber tainted by the compromise of primetime TV. Instead, it is a deeply inventive, deeply complex look at a tragedy that struck a community.

Green and crew recorded 300 hours of footage in Boulder over a 15-month period, editing on the fly. Seventy-five amateur/semi-professional actors from the local community – all touched by the case in some way – made audition tapes for a supposed docudrama, some scenes of which were shot and interwoven into the final film.

Eager to please – and to play the various roles – they all share what they thought happened. The team elicits both riveting performances and interviews: funny, sad, emotional and, at times, shocking.

Embracing the artifice of theatre, the intimacy of camera-confessional and the stylisation of drama, the film cannily and courageously uses meta-narrative to subvert both audience expectations and documentary form. A multiplicity of voices and viewpoints are heard. At heart it’s a provocative and empathetic meditation on cinema, human tragedy, collective memory and how we each relate to grief, pain and loss. In effect, the film looks back at us.

The aim was not to exploit JonBenét Ramsey any further, but to close the book on her.

Archival footage of the Ramsey family is distinctly absent. “The family’s suffering is inconceivable,” Green explains. “You’ll find 20 bad JonBenét Ramsey movies [that have been] made over the years.

“The aim was not to exploit JonBenét Ramsey any further, but to close the book on her. We decided to stay away from the real family and just concentrate on the community around it [the case].”

Since world premiering at Sundance, Casting JonBenét has been followed by five-star reviews – plus some reservations around how “in on the final film” the actors were.

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“It was a collaborative project,” Green says definitively. “From the beginning I told them a lot about exactly what I envisioned the film to be, and was very up front – that it was going to be a very constructed film, from their casting tapes and the re-enactments.

“In some ways it felt like a community theatre piece… an ensemble piece. We’re all in it together, which was really beautiful. Like we were all involved in ‘the experiment’, which is what we labeled it.

“So it was this kind of evolving project and we were all just trying things out and taking risks, which was really incredible. I think everyone felt like they were part of ‘something’.”

Sometimes it takes a great work of art to remind us of the humanity inside a tragic, unfathomable event. Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line is one such movie: Kitty Green’s Casting JonBenét is now another.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The girls auditioning to play JonBenét Ramsey in Casting JonBenét . Photograph: Michael Latham/Netflix

“A lot of people have come up to me and said that for the first time they can empathise with the family,” says Green. “Not because they thought they were ‘guilty’ or ‘innocent’, but just because [the film] humanised the tragedy in some way.”

“Rather than it just being a whodunnit, it became about a loss of life, which was really important to me.”

• Casting JonBenét will screen on Netflix in April