The Princess

Premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival in the Premieres Selection.

This documentary is about Princess Diana's story that is told exclusively through contemporaneous archive creating a bold and immersive narrative of her life and death. It also illuminates how the public's attitude to the monarchy was, and still is. This documentary is truly an emotional experience that goes in-depth about the life of Princess Diana's career and it does a great job on handling it's source material without being biased.

Director Ed Perkins managed to make a documentary that feels engaging, emotional, thought-provoking and well documented that you get a sense of reality and story about Princess Diana and everything that has been surrounding her. The soundtrack fits perfectly to the scenes being filmed, good editing, great sound design and the archive footage is well used and looks beautiful to look at. Restoration footages are always a treat to see as it helps to give you a good out look of what the past looked like. It's truly an experience to watch.

Diana has already been a big subject for years and knowing about her life and having down research about her problems and situations did make me feel emotional about it. Perkins did a fantastic job on documenting the film and I regret not seeing it when it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival right away.

A great mix of drama, realism and sometimes true horror.

Rating: A-

I've watched every documentary out there about Princess Diana. This is the most unbiased, objective and straightforward one to date. It provides a thorough and concise background as well as context into the individuals and relationships. For later generations that never saw Diana while she was alive, this provides a good foundation. What sets this documentary apart from most are the never before seen videos and footage.

Solid documentary that doesn't shy away from all of the opinions about Diana and the monarchy. No narrator or interviews, instead just a collection of interesting news clips and found footage that helps portray her life. Well edited, engaging, and interesting. I was 13 when she died, and this film helped me to understand why everyone was so devastated by the loss. Good companion piece to 'the crown' and 'the queen'.

This documentary tells, at a pace, the story of Princess Diana through media coverage.

Many phases of Diana's relationship with the media, eg the Bashir interview, are worth a documentary in their own right.

The commentary is unspoken through the editing and music score. It doesn't tell those who lived through the 80s and 90s anything new and it certainly won't be last work on Diana's life.

There has been a lot of work selecting a vast range of archive footage, primarily from the UK and the US, with many hitherto unseen finds.

Most, if not all, of the original source material was shot in 4:3. I question the decision to crop and zoom all of this for widescreen, with a consequent degradation in picture quality. It would have been better to have preserved the original 4:3 aspect ratio.

On the Bashir interview, these are the only clips credited to the source on screen during the documentary. I understand this is because the BBC didn't give clearance for their use (the BBC has actually banned it from being licensed or repeated) and the documentary makers are claiming fair dealing on its use.

I love documentaries more when they include archival materials such as videos and documents. This documentary is full of videos from the early 1980s to 1997 covering the time Diana passed from Prince Charles's girlfriend to her death. However, the film does not offer a timeline, a context, or an interview that helps situate the viewer in the images they are watching. For those who lived through those times, it is not challenging to situate themselves in the time situations shown in the archive videos happen. But anyone who did not live during those years can feel lost in the film. It feels like the people behind the film had to access all that video material and focus mainly on the editing part forgetting about the viewers. It could be done much better.