I don’t know why my mom died, but from what I can ascertain, I know how she died. For me, it’s about following leads, and I’m just trying to exonerate people so my family could trust each other again. In some people’s grieving process, they couldn’t leave it lingering, there is some confirmation bias that comes along with needing answers, and people start at the end and try to fill in the dots. Your world becomes that much less safe and your trust levels become less. Part of the challenge of the initial investigation - and I can’t speak for the police - with going through grief, there’s a human need for an answer partly because of self-preservation. That’s something that I felt was missing in other true-crime documentaries.ĭid you have a suspect? Did that change throughout the making of the doc? When I tell people my mom got murdered, there’s a thing that goes through people’s minds, and the doc has changed those connotations, and breaking that fourth wall was very important to me. In episode four, you see the documentary might cause problems for the people involved. The pendulum swung pretty far in the other direction. When I started questions in 2013, it was from the perspective of the son. And those two elements and perspectives are not always… they created a lot of conflicts. I was sort of split throughout this process of being a journalistic investigator and the brother, nephew, son. The gifting tables, for example.ĭid you ever find yourself struggling to balance being an unbiased journalist and a son who had lost his mother?Įxtremely. It felt like my clenched teeth sometimes, that the exterior was more and more hyperbolic as the darkness was manifesting. There is this overarching theme of duality of the facades of the shoreline over the wealthy privilege I grew up with, with the inherent conflicts of darkness. The most surprising realization for me was - and maybe I was just naive and thinking that I knew my mother - how sheltered I was. I think they understood that this part of exploring this is the only way I can do that. I don’t think anyone was opposed to me doing it, even if it meant sacrificing their own privacy. When she died, I called her phone because I wanted to hear her voice - it brought this wave of something I hadn’t dealt with. Guilt and regret is a way of trying to get the past back when you’re going through grief. I think I held onto regret for not being a better son, and this has provided me a second opportunity to do so. Her thoughts about her body, if she’d be in a relationship again, if I would land on my feet, if we ever got along. The story revolves around me looking for answers, but I couldn’t help but feel an intense amount of sadness, the little things of sadness that she was going through that I didn’t know. Going through her Facebook was this insane amount of empathy. I think part of obsessing over this was a part of bargaining - if I can keep digging and discovering things about her, I never have to deal with her loss. What was it like going through your mom’s Facebook? It’s more about trying to exonerate people and dispel distrust among family members. As the conversations unraveled, we realized this was bigger than just a feature… It was a tough pitch because it was, ultimately, a story about identity and a story about navigating the trauma of an unresolved crime, not a headline for the brutality or dissecting the specifics of the crime. In 2016, we had a little more intention in what we were doing. We quickly realized this was bigger than a short project for documentary class - we didn’t finish the assignment, my professor gave me an A with the condition that I never stop working on this. That eventually turned to grieving Barbara and finding this empathy for all these people in my life. I got addicted to that, I was grieving someone that I didn’t really know and there was this discovery process. She was a superhero to me, but I quickly realized I didn’t know Barbara. When I started, I realized I didn’t know my mom. And before it was too late, I wanted to take a record of what people remembered. The first time I really had an experience telling someone what had happened was in the documentary class, where I felt I was coming out of the fog, out of the shock and drug addiction. 30, 2010, I came back to school - I was in film school when it happened - I didn’t tell anyone. When my mom died, I was a drug addict, I was addicted to opioids, I ran from accepting the world without her. Madison Hamburg: When I started the doc, I didn’t have it in my head that this was going to be on the stage that it was on.
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