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film director and editor
Kitty Green is a film director and editor.
PROFILE
Kitty Green
Guest
FROM Kitty Green
The Business
Kitty Green on 'Casting JonBenet' The new documentary Casting JonBenet premiered at Sundance earlier this year and is now making its debut on Netflix. The film is not a true-crime investigation. It doesn't dig into the facts or try to unearth new evidence in the 1996 still-unsolved murder of six-year-old JonBenet Ramsey. Instead, the film uses footage of actors auditioning to perform in a film about the crime. In the process, they reveal their own wide-ranging reactions to the case -- which continues to be a source of fascination and speculation more than 20 years after Ramsey's death. The director of Casting JonBenet is 32-year-old Australian filmmaker Kitty Green. And this is not her first time working in an unconventional fashion. For her 2013 documentary, Ukraine Is Not a Brothel, Green embedded with a radical feminist group in Kiev during the country's revolution, and ended up, she says, getting abducted by the KGB. The charge against her? Filming a protest. Making her newest film was emotionally intense, but not quite that harrowing. For Casting JonBenet, Green traveled to Boulder, Colorado -- the scene of the crime -- to film auditions with local actors to play the parents -- John and Patsy Ramsey -- their son Burke, JonBenet herself, and others who were caught up in the saga. For many viewers, Casting JonBenet raises immediate questions about whether the actors auditioning for roles in a nonexistent movie had been duped. Green tells us how that was not the case -- she says she carefully explained to participants what they were signing up for, and that for many people living in Boulder, telling their JonBenet stories and theories ended up being a cathartic experience.
Press Play with Madeleine Brand
'Casting JonBenet' explores how we see traumatic events Six-year-old pageant queen JonBenet Ramsey was found murdered in the basement of her family’s home 21 years ago. The case was never solved. A new documentary about JonBenet doesn’t attempt to find out what really happened. Instead, “Casting JonBenet” is an experiment in the human imagination, from the grotesque to the traumatic.
Recommended
Press Play with Madeleine Brand
MacArthur ‘Genius’ Vijay Gupta on trauma, choices, and excellence LA Phil violinist Vijay Gupta recently won a MacArthur “genius” grant. He’s known for launching Street Symphony, a nonprofit that brings classical music to Skid Row, homeless shelters, and the LA County jail. He explains that now, he can finally write his own rules and choose his own excellence. He didn’t have many choices as a kid, raised by Indian immigrant parents in New York.
Film Reviews
First Man Here’s the radical notion behind Damien Chazelle’s “First Man”: Tell the story of mankind’s boldest adventure thus far, the Apollo 11 mission that reached the moon nearly a half-century ago, but tell it through a taciturn, emotionally closed-off hero, Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the lunar surface.
Scheer Intelligence
NAFTA 2.0, Trump Got It Right? Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch and a 25-year veteran of congressional trade battles, discusses NAFTA 2.0, the Trump Administration’s newly negotiated trade agreement between Mexico, Canada and the United States that, improbable as it may seem, could actually give Mexican workers a living wage and end corporate control of trade courts.