“I think they wanted to solve my mom’s murder they were overwhelmed with the potential for reasonable doubt,” he says. They ended up asking to see his footage, believing there could be things his family would “let slip” to him that they would never say in front of officers. He met with police officers in their station, for example, to talk about developments in the case, which he recorded “mostly for notes,” he says, but when they began interrogating him he also wanted to protect himself. But there was also just certain footage he would not have been able to capture had he not been willing to put himself on-screen. Hamburg shares that “Minding the Gap” influenced that storytelling approach. But, “we wanted the audience to be with me throughout the journey, rather than being told what the journey was.” “There was a certain point where I questioned whether my life was driving the documentary or the documentary was driving my life and that’s a really ethically ambiguous question because the two are in tandem and it’s just a unique byproduct of the situation,” he says.
So in our first round of filming, I didn’t really cross that line that much, but in 2016 when I hd a grant through an alumni program I didn’t know where this would end up, but if this was my only chance to look the elephant and the eye and address it, I felt like if I didn’t take that opportunity - if I didn’t ask bluntly these really tough questions - than I never would have exonerated people I love and I never would have gotten past that.”Īsking those tough questions was hardly easy for Hamburg, who put himself in the docuseries, not only through archival family photos and home movies, but also through his interviews and even a visit to the home where his mother was killed. “Even in just casual conversation I was never in a situation where I would ask a family member point-blank if they had anything to do with the murder. I wanted to maintain the least amount of bias as I could from the investigative perspective but I was very protective over maintaining the arcs,” he explains.
“There’s that dual role that I have as a filmmaker and a family member and they’re not always in concert with each other. While he admits this helped him get the family interviews because “we had this common goal of wanting to understand why it happened,” he also acknowledges the experience caused him to have a bit of a double life while filming, as well. Hamburg is in a truly unique position as a filmmaker with “Murder on Middle Beach” in that he has a direct, personal connection to not only the central character in the story, his mother, but also every individual person interviewed, whether it’s his younger sister, his maternal aunt, his father or members of the police force in Connecticut who sometimes claim the case is cold and sometimes claim they just got a new lead.
“The potential that this story had for me was to learn more about my mom,” he says, adding that a specific storytelling goal of his was to “subvert the exploitive nature of shock and awe that, as a family member, I can honestly say is destructive.” Years later, with the case still unsolved and after members of his extended family have raised suspicions about each other’s involvement in the crime, Hamburg has taken all of the emotion and his unanswered questions and packaged them into a potentially career-defining docuseries, his first long-form project as a filmmaker. When he returned to school he didn’t tell anybody there about what had happened to his mother because of “shame” and “connotations around what that meant,” he tells Variety. He was also dealing with a drug addiction, for which he went to rehab later that year. 15 on HBO, he was a teenager when his mother, Barbara Beach Hamburg, was murdered in 2010. As he documents in the four-part “ Murder on Middle Beach” docuseries, debuting Nov. The road has not been easy for Hamburg, though. Living a self-described “double life,” Hamburg says, led him to feeling “fragmented as a person,” and now that the result of that multi-year project is finally being shared with the world he is hoping for the “closure to feel whole again.” Madison Hamburg began working on a documentary about his mother’s life and murder when he was still in film school in 2013, but as he was doing so, he did not tell anyone outside of the crew he was working with and the family members he was interviewing for the piece what he was doing.
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