Festival Predictions

2017 Sundance Film Festival Predictions: Kitty Green’s Casting JonBenet

Published on November 23, 2016

Don’t have to look far out into Sundance’s past for samples of the docu form being challenged, incinerated and invigorated. While Kate Plays Christine is an exemplary example, we’ll certainly be drawing comparisons between Aussie Kitty Green‘s Sundance winning short The Face of Ukraine: Casting Oksana Baiul (2013) with what she has in store as her sophomore docu feature. Green’s debut film Ukraine Is Not A Brothel (2013) premiered at the Venice Film Festival and played at just about every film fest, but if selected, Casting JonBenet (a Cinereach funded project that received development coin from the Sundance Institute and support in the shape of James Schamus) will likely have shuttle bus buzz well before its premiere.

Gist: An artful exploration of the legacy of the world’s most sensational child-murder case, the unsolved death of six-year-old American beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey.

Production Co./Producers: Forensic Films’ Scott Macaulay (War Story), Kitty Green.

Prediction: U.S. Documentary Comp.

U.S. Distributor: Rights Available. TBD (domestic). TBD (international)

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Related Topics:2017 Sundance Film Festival Predictions, Casting JonBenet, Kitty Green, Scott Macaulay, top-stories

Eric Lavallée

Eric Lavallée is the founder, CEO, editor-in-chief, film journalist and critic at IONCINEMA.com (founded in 2000). Eric is a regular at Sundance, Cannes and TIFF. He has a BFA in Film Studies at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema. In 2013 he served as a Narrative Competition Jury Member at the SXSW Film Festival. He was an associate producer on Mark Jackson's This Teacher (2018 LA Film Festival, 2018 BFI London). In 2022 he served as a New Flesh Comp for Best First Feature at the 2022 Fantasia Intl. Film Festival. Current top films for 2022 include Tár (Todd Field), All That Breathes (Shaunak Sen), Aftersun (Charlotte Wells).