Newtown

On 14 December 2012, twenty children and six adults were shot dead at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. The documentary does not restage that day. It is about the town that was left afterwards: the families, the teachers, the doctors, the firefighters. It was filmed over three years. People talk about their children's rooms, their friendships, their habits. Some of them go to work on changing gun laws; some are only trying to stay standing. Kim A. Snyder directs; eighty-five minutes. It screened at Sundance. The film never names the gunman and stays entirely with the people left behind. What it is about is not an event but a town learning to carry a loss.