Handle With Care

The Unique Responsibility of Sensitive Filmmaking

(Warning: the end of this article contains a spoiler)

There’s a reason true crime is everywhere nowadays: on streaming platforms, in podcasts, in the window of every bookshop you walk past. It promises real-life drama with the stakes of fiction, whilst appealing to our fascination with the macabre.

But our fascination has consequences. With the rise of the true crime documentary has come the rise of people who’ve faced significant trauma now becoming the subject matter, their trauma brought to the surface once again: victims and their loved ones; witnesses who’ve been scarred by terrible events; even those wrongly accused of a crime they didn’t commit.

Filming with vulnerable contributors is a constant balancing act between telling an honest, revealing story and safeguarding the emotional and psychological wellbeing of those involved. Add in the intricacies of sensitive legal processes, where every decision can carry significant consequences, and the filmmaker’s role quickly becomes one of immense responsibility.

Nowhere was this more apparent to me than in the making of The Accused.

Within five minutes of discussing the project with Brinkworth Films, whose original concept it was, I was sold. The feature-length documentary was ambitious: it would, for the first time, take viewers deep inside the lives and emotions of someone charged with a serious crime.

Crucial to the idea was telling the story in real-time rather than retrospectively. We wanted to follow the accused and their loved ones right up until their verdict and go behind the scenes with the lawyers responsible for trying to defend their liberty.

The stakes were immediately clear. We weren’t merely observers – every question, every scene we filmed carried the weight of potentially influencing the accused’s emotional wellbeing and their legal stance. A strict set of filming protocols was put in place, enabling us to film with defendants and their lawyers while navigating significant issues of privilege and contempt. From a filmmaking perspective, it felt incredibly nerve-wracking, but immensely exciting as well – provided we could find a compelling yet resilient central figure.

Then GT Stewart, the law firm assisting us in searching for cases, introduced me to Kenzey at their office in central London. She made an immediate impact: open and utterly unguarded in a way I hadn’t expected. She was also facing incredibly serious charges.

Kenzey was accused of failing to protect her baby from a violent assault by her boyfriend, potentially resulting in a decade in prison. The complexity of her case and the emotional vulnerability at its heart were exactly what we’d been looking for, and it was immediately obvious that Kenzey would be a fascinating central character.

Amid the turmoil of her life – her children removed by social services, her trial just 10 weeks away – she articulated her experiences with remarkable eloquence and self-awareness. She strongly believed her ordeal as an accused individual was something the public needed to understand. Crucially, she seemed robust enough to handle the intense scrutiny of filming and possessed the courage to tell her deeply personal story on camera.

When filming began, producer Charlotte Sinden joined the team, bringing sharp editorial and compliance instincts. As we captured the build-up to Kenzey’s trial, the greatest challenge lay in managing the emotional and psychological intensity alongside the sheer volume and complexity of the case evidence. Meetings between Kenzey and her lawyers could last for hours and involved an enormous amount of discussion and detail.

We soon realised the strength of our material lay precisely in its density, ambiguity and contradictions. Just like a drama, it wouldn’t be a problem if everything didn’t immediately add up, if the narrative was puckered by moments of doubt or confusion.

One moment stood out: when text messages sent between herself and her boyfriend in the months preceding the alleged assault on their child contradicted her own account of their relationship. It interrupted the editorial and evidential throughline that we were building – it jarred – but it added to the unsettling sense that the truth was constantly shifting.

Alongside those twists and turns lay Kenzey’s personal experience. When filming with her alone, a small, unobtrusive two-person crew became essential to preserving the intimacy and trust necessary for such sensitive storytelling. I deliberately avoided asking for her immediate reactions to legal meetings (lest I influence her views on proceedings and unintentionally shape her defence), instead focusing on capturing her authentic emotional and psychological journey.

We knew it was vital for the backbone of the film to be Kenzey’s own voice, revealing the profound psychological impact of being accused of a serious crime. She spoke with honesty, even when it clearly came at a cost, confronting her emotions and the immense pressures she faced.

As this was a feature-length doc, we had a generous amount of time in the edit – and all of it was needed. Alongside the complexity of the story, all our footage had to be carefully cross-referenced with court transcripts to ensure that only information, evidence and testimony presented in open court was included. If it wasn’t heard by the jury, it couldn’t be included in the final documentary.

Fortunately, the film was cut by the brilliant Steve Barclay. He harnessed the twists and turns superbly, ensuring the central question – “Is she guilty or not?” – remained compellingly unresolved throughout. In fact, I decided with Steve at the outset that I wouldn’t tell him the result of Kenzey’s trial or let him see that material until we’d developed a rough cut that took us up to that point. This approach significantly shaped the film’s emotional depth and narrative tension.

When Steve finally looked at the verdict footage, which the rest of us had seen much earlier, he discovered that Kenzey was found guilty and sentenced to three years. According to her defence team, the main reason was her failure to distance herself from her boyfriend. She had continued to champion his innocence, despite overwhelming medical evidence that he had violently assaulted their baby.

After sentencing, the next time Charlotte and I saw Kenzey was when we visited her in prison. We didn’t kid ourselves that we or the documentary were priorities for her at that point – they paled in insignificance against the challenge of adjusting to life behind bars – but wherever possible, handling sensitive stories with care means that responsibility doesn’t end when filming does.

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