‘Immersive’ new Princess Diana documentary aims to ‘explore our complicity’ in her tragic life and death
- While previous documentaries tried to ‘get inside Diana’s head’, The Princess focuses on how the press and public perceived and judged her behaviour
- Director Ed Perkins says he hopes this film offers ‘a more complex understanding of both Diana and the relationship we still have with the royal family’
An “immersive” Princess Diana documentary offering an “origin story” for the British royal family’s latest woes was among the opening night films at the online Sundance film festival Thursday.
Sundance, which celebrates independent cinema, was forced to go virtual for a second year running by the Omicron variant of Covid-19’s surge across the United States.
The pandemic has forced filmmakers to innovate, and ‘The Princess’ is one of several Sundance films constructed entirely from archive footage.
Without a narrator, it transports viewers back to Diana’s tumultuous marriage to Prince Charles, and explores an obsessed media and public’s impact on those events via contemporaneous footage.
Princess Diana was the world’s most photographed woman of her time. So when director Ed Perkins had the idea to make a documentary about her life using solely archival footage, the British filmmaker had plenty to work with.
‘The Princess,’ which opened the virtual Sundance Film Festival Thursday and will be released by HBO later this year, examines the beguiling royal’s life from her 1981 engagement to Prince Charles of Wales to her tragic 1997 death in a car accident at 36.
