Diana’s documentary opens Sundance

An "immersive" Princess Diana documentary offering an "origin story" for the British royal family’s latest woes was among the opening night movies at the online Sundance film festival late on 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 movies 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.

"It is a kind of Shakespearean tragedy, but it’s one that lots of us lived through, and actually actively participated in," said director Ed Perkins. While many previous documentaries tried to "get inside Diana’s head", Perkins focuses on how the press and public perceived and judged her behaviour. Well-known awkward interviews given by the couple to major broadcasters sit alongside rough footage of bored paparazzi with long lenses crouching in bushes, complaining among themselves about Diana’s wariness.

Diana’s death is seen via home-video footage of a group of friends watching live TV news reports, whose initial excitement and light-heartedness turns to horror as the seriousness of the Paris car crash becomes clear.

Acknowledging that countless documentaries have been made about Diana, Perkins said he hoped the film could "add something new to the conversation" by creating something "more immersive and experiential."

The film "tried to live in the contemporaneous archive from the time, and allow it to unfold in a ‘present-tense’ unfolding." It comes as the monarchy has been rocked by the departure of Prince Harry and his wife Meghan, who accused the family of racism and fought legal battles with the British press over privacy.