Kate Plays Christine
2016 film by Robert Greene

Kate Plays Christine is a 2016 American documentary film written and directed by Robert Greene. It follows actress Kate Lyn Sheil's preparation for the role of Christine Chubbuck, a newscaster who committed suicide on live television in 1974, for a fictitious film. It is one of the two films about Chubbuck that premiered at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival, the other being Christine.
Release
The film premiered on January 24, 2016, at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival in the U.S. Documentary Competition section, where it won the Special Jury Award for Writing. It was also selected to screen at the 66th Berlin International Film Festival in February 2016. Grasshopper Film acquired the US distribution rights to the film in April 2016. The film was released in one theater on August 26, 2016.
Critical response
On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 82% based on 55 reviews, with an average rating of 7.3/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Kate Plays Christine blurs genres—and the line between fact and reality—with a cleverly provocative docudrama look at newscaster Christine Chubbuck's life and death." On Metacritic, the film has a score of 75 out of 100 based on 19 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Kate Plays Christine” as 2016 film by Robert Greene. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the arts & letters register because the source frames it as 2016 film by Robert Greene. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q24577532. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2016 and 1974.
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This entry incorporates text from “Kate Plays Christine” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.