CENTERPIECE FILM PRESENTATION!
In 1974, a Florida newscaster Christine Chubbuck shocked morning viewers and coworkers by pulling out a gun and shooting herself in the head live on the air. This is considered the first televised suicide in history, and though it was the inspiration for the 1976 Academy Award Best Picture nominee NETWORK, the story and facts behind the event remain mostly unknown.
Forty years later, rising film star Kate Lyn Sheil agrees to be cast in a “stylized cheap ‘70s soap opera” version of Christine’s story, and to prepare for the role, the actress travels to Chubbuck's hometown. Gumshoe-style, she conducts interviews with a variety of subjects, from a gun store employee to a fellow news anchor to a family friend.
Filmmaker Robert Greene (SF DocFest Non-Fiction Award recipient - 2013) cleverly forgoes your standard talking-head-and-sound-bite approach to nonfiction storytelling, instead choosing to employ Kate as a conduit to understanding an impossibly complex issue. Committed to doing justice to Christine’s life, Kate not only candidly pulls back the curtain on her acting process, but she also reveals the biases and presumptions even supposed experts can provide in their diagnosis. Winner of the U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Writing at the Sundance Film Festival, KATE PLAYS CHRISTINE slowly peels the documentary onion back and boldly challenges its subjects and audience alike to accept that answers from the past are never easy.- Chris Metzler