Skip to main content

Grief and Resilience in 'Newtown'

Daniel Hautzinger
Nicole Hockley, mother of Sandy Hook victim, and first responder Sgt. Bill Cario. (Courtesy of Derek Weisehahn)
Nicole Hockley, mother of Sandy Hook victim, and first responder Sgt. Bill Cario. (Courtesy of Derek Weisehahn)

How – and why – do you make a documentary about an unspeakable tragedy such as the mass shooting that took the lives of twenty children and six staff at Newtown, Connecticut’s Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 14, 2012?

“I don’t think that any of us that were in there feel like anybody needs to know specifically what we saw,” Sergeant Bill Cario, a first responder, says in the film Newtown, which airs on Independent Lens on Monday, April 3 at 9:00 pm and is available to stream. “Emotionally, I think the world needs to know to understand it.”

'Newtown' Director and Producer Kim A. Snyder. (Courtesy of Stefano Giovannini)'Newtown' Director and Producer Kim A. Snyder. (Courtesy of Stefano Giovannini)That is the creed of Newtown: to memorialize in order to inspire change through human stories, without any exploitative agenda. “I was able to say to people, ‘This is a long-form story where we can explore why you think it’s important for you to tell this story, what it’s important for the world to know,” says director and producer Kim A. Snyder. “I simply think it’s important to give these people a voice and to bear witness, with the idea that perhaps it could shift behavior and consciousness.”

Snyder and her co-producer Maria Cuomo Cole spent more than three and a half years making the film in an attempt to explore the long-term effects of gun violence on a community. “It really started as a look at collective grief, trauma, and the resilience of a community,” Snyder explains. “As the journey of the filmmaking went on, it became increasingly important for me to be thinking about underlying issues of gun violence in a way that wasn’t overt advocacy but got into it in a different, emotional way.”

Part of the reason Snyder felt compelled to address gun violence was because many of the residents of Newtown wanted to. “Early on, we would hear a mantra of ‘We don’t want to be just remembered as a place of tragedy, but as a place of meaningful change,’” she recalls. “I think because we took this very human and emotional approach of grief and resilience, it’s making an impact that it never would have, had it been a more decidedly advocacy, agenda film. We’ve had gun owners come up and say, ‘This film is gonna get to guys like me.’ It penetrates when it’s authentic, and you build that trust, and take it on as a collaboration.”

The community mourns after the Newtown tragedy. (Courtesy of Jennifer Cox)“I simply think it’s important to give these people a voice and to bear witness," Kim Snyder says. (Courtesy of Jennifer Cox)Snyder describes the film as a collaboration because it is so deeply rooted in the relationships she formed while spending years in the community of Newtown. “The relationships and the trust that were built were very organic,” she says. “There were a lot of off-camera conversations, and it was very slow. I didn’t meet the first of the parents who participated until maybe eight months after I was up there, and very reluctantly and hesitantly. They had been put in touch with me. There was no cold-calling.”

This was in contrast to much of the rapid-fire, insensitive media coverage that happens in the wake of such a tragedy, a difference in approach attested to by the fact that Snyder was invited to some church memorial services on the first anniversary of the shooting, while the town told many other media figures to stay away.

“The approach was the opposite of prurient,” Snyder says. “The overwhelming sense of responsibility was almost as profound as the sense of grief. It felt like holding something very, very precious, because for some people it was very meaningful for them to share their story, and very important.”

Some people were so keen to share their grief that they dug deeper than Snyder herself thought she could handle. “There were times where it was like, ‘I don’t want to go there.’ I really wasn’t trying to pull anything out of anybody. I think people understood that there was not a one-way agenda, this was an exploration.”

Daniel Barden, a victim of the Newtown tragedy. (Courtesy of Mark Barden)Daniel Barden, a victim of the Newtown tragedy. (Courtesy of Mark Barden)One of Snyder’s goals with the film was to “break through a kind of numbing desensitization I think we’re all experiencing as these things happen with increasing frequency,” by focusing on the human grief and trauma of a community instead of just the facts of another shooting. But now that the documentary has been made and released (it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival last year), she and Cuomo Cole are more directly addressing gun violence through a series of webisodes released on People magazine’s website.

“Those are more pointedly about ‘What are we going to do about this?’” she says. “They use some of the footage we couldn’t use in the documentary, plus some additional stuff that we’ve shot, to really look at the ripple effect, to look at this club that no one wants to belong to that’s growing. We want to encourage civil discourse. To take this issue out of the terribly polarized political sphere and treat it as the public health crisis that it is. And we hope the film can be part of that.”