Casting JonBenet

Casting JonBenet is a documentary that revisits the 1996 death of six-year-old JonBenet Ramsey, a child beauty pageant contestant found dead in her family's Boulder, Colorado home. Two decades later, the case remains officially unsolved, and the film approaches it not by reconstructing the crime but by examining how the community that lived through it remembers and interprets what happened.

Director Kitty Green, who wrote the screenplay with John Simpson, builds the film around auditions held in Boulder. Local residents try out for the roles of the people involved in the case, and in the process they offer their own theories and personal reactions. The result mixes documentary and drama, letting ordinary people perform versions of a story that has never been settled. This was Green's first feature, followed later by The Assistant and The Royal Hotel.

The production was a collaboration across Australia, China and the United States, with James Schamus, Scott Macaulay and Green among the producers, and a large credited cast and crew. On IMDb it holds a rating of 6.1 from around 6,000 votes, while on TMDB it stands at 5.6 from 175 votes. A film critics' rating of 7.2 from 54 reviews places it noticeably higher among reviewers than among general audiences.