“I Was Raised by a Journalist, I Am a Journalist, and Here Was Someone Taken from the Earth Simply for Doing Her Job”: Erin Lee Carr on her HBO Doc Undercurrent: The Disappearance of Kim Wall

Erin Lee Carr’s latest two-part doc for HBO tackles one of the grizzliest — and weirdest — true crime cases to make international headlines in recent years. In fact, the tale at the center of Undercurrent: The Disappearance of Kim Wall is likely already familiar to HBO viewers, as Tobias Lindholm’s six-part narrative series The Investigation is based on the same bizarre event. It was back in 2017 that the Swedish journalist Kim Wall, living with her boyfriend in Denmark at the time, went missing in the waters right off Copenhagen following a trip in a homemade midget submarine built by the guy she was profiling for an article: the Elon Musk-like Danish entrepreneur Peter “Rocket” Madsen, who also co-founded the amateur open source space program Copenhagen Suborbitals. After initially claiming that he had dropped her off after the interview, Madsen soon claimed there had been some sort of freak accident, so he decided to bury her at sea. But then slowly the truth began to emerge (along with several body parts). What makes Carr’s take so refreshing is her focus on sidelining Wall’s tragic death in favor of her short dramatic life. Sure, the doc is full of riveting trial testimony (Madsen was convicted and sentenced to life in prison) and enlightening interviews with everyone from Royal Denmark Navy investigators to Madsen’s regretful biographer. But the female-focused director (HBO’s At the Heart of Gold: Inside the USA Gymnastics Scandal, I Love You, Now Die: The Commonwealth v. Michelle Carter, etc.) seems much more concerned with ensuring that the accomplished Wall — a London School of Economics and Columbia University grad who received grants from organizations like the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and the International Women’s Media Foundation — is at the center of her own story. Interviews with close friends, and images from her globetrotting reporting trips as a freelancer for The New York Times, The Guardian, Vice, Slate, Time and more, remind us that in her 30 years Wall made a difference in the world — and more so than her eccentric middle-aged murderer. In doing so Carr has taken the power of the narrative back from a narcissistic psychopath and returned it to the victim. Filmmaker reached out to the twice Emmy Award-nominated director just prior to the doc’s debut (both “Part One: The Crime” and “Part Two: The Punishment” began streaming March 8).

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.