Three directors in the evolving, wildly popular true crime genre said it’s so much more than that as they talked memory, indoctrination, justice, trust and the serendipity of chronicling events that are unfolding across a trio of captivating documentary series.
Jehane Noujaim, Nanfu Wang and Todd Schramke, directors and executive producers of, respectively, The Vow, Mind Over Murder and The Anarchists, joined the “HBO Doc Panel: Crime and Justice” as part of the Deadline FYC House + HBO Max screening and panel series.
Noujaim’s The Vow, Part II follows the NXIVM self-improvement group/sex cult, whose leader Keith Raniere was convicted of sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy. It shows a world run by indoctrination, where people can be both victims and perpetrators – “one of the reasons why it’s so difficult for courts to prosecute cults,” Noujaim told the panel moderator, Vox’s Alissa Wilkinson.
Schramke’s documentary, set amid a convention of anarchists in Acapulco, was well underway before being interrupted by a death. “We didn’t really know there was going to be a crime. But the probability was definitely in our favor. Fourth most dangerous city in the world,” he said. He started out in 2016 making a doc on the cryptocurrency movement “from the perspective of the people who are driven by the ideology [and] it just kind of unfolded as it did.”
Within the anarchist community, two couples emerged and clashed: one well-to-do, who left the U.S. with their children to find a freer life in Mexico; the other, young fugitives on the run from drug charges. “Even within the most, sort of fringe, political ideological realm there was this pattern we see in our society, which is that there’s class conflict at the root of everything,” Schramke said. “The personal journey and experience of those driven by the events” is what matters.
All three talked about building trust. It’s why Nanzy Salzman, a close associate of Raniere’s, opened up to The Vow filmmakers in surprising ways in Season 2. “I’d approached her about a year before she actually met with me,” Noujaim said. “I spent the previous three years filming people who were trying to take down the organization, and from the completely other side … and finally, I was sitting with the person who had access to all this information.”
Wang’s psychologically complex story Mind Over Murder follows six individuals convicted of then exonerated many years later for a 1985 murder in Beatrice, NE. Confessions had been twisted out of them and most actually still remembered committing the crime, even though they know they didn’t. The family of the victim, tied for years to one narrative, also refuses to believe the innocence of the Beatrice Six, as they’re called. The six-part series “is not about crime,” Wang said. “I was fascinated by memory.”
“When a false narrative is told to you. And for years and decades, if someone believed in that false narrative — which is, I think, [reflective of] our current political and social state — what would it take for them to see it differently?”
Check out the conversation in the video above.
