Northwest Film Forum

A mesmerically self-reflexive documentary that takes as its source the infamous but often unspoken on-air suicide of Christine Chubbuck on a Sarasota evening news program in 1974 (long-rumored to be the source of Hollywood’s Network), which director Robert Greene pursues as an inquiry into historical record - at a time when America's appetite for sensationalized media was just being whetted - as well as the moral underpinnings of reconstructing the story as a modern day drama. Enter Kate Lyn Sheil (The Girlfriend Experience, Listen Up Phillip), an actor from New York who heads to Florida and, in an attempt to get into "character" as Christine, finds herself in a liminal zone between the personal and professional demands of her work, inheriting the newscaster’s demons while exorcising some of her own, as art and exploitation become inextricable. Greene's construct deftly navigates multiple histories and aesthetic strategies in a beguilingly concentric fashion, alighting on issues of artifice, performance, depression, media, violence, memory, and spectatorship. Curiously, the film was the first documentary to win a Special Jury Award for Writing at the Sundance Film Festival.