Casting JonBenet

Casting JonBenet (2017) is Kitty Green's documentary experiment, and you can watch it online on iFILM. Two decades after six-year-old JonBenet Ramsey was killed, the director gathers actors from Boulder, Colorado to audition for roles in America's most infamous unsolved child murder.

What the camera records is the casting sessions themselves, not a reenactment. Neighbors, former cops and local mothers try on the parts of the father, the mother, the detective — and slip into their own theories about who did it and why. Green stays mostly silent. She lets people talk, and out of their hunches, rumors and private grief a portrait of a town that never let the case go takes shape.

The film premiered at Sundance before Netflix picked it up. The odd structure throws you for the first ten minutes, then it grips: this isn't a whodunit, it's a study of how someone else's tragedy becomes a mirror for everyone around it. Stream Casting JonBenet (2017) online on iFILM.