“I Never Saw This as a ‘True Crime’ Series”: Nanfu Wang on HBO Docuseries Mind Over Murder

One of the more surprising revelations in the provocatively titled six-part docuseries Mind Over Murder has nothing to do with the sad tale presented onscreen of the “Beatrice Six,” as the three men and three women convicted (and ultimately absolved) of killing a beloved grandma in Beatrice, Nebraska back in 1985 came to be known. Instead, the surprise comes when the end credits disclose the story is being revisited by none other than critically-acclaimed director Nanfu Wang (In the Same Breath, One Child Nation), not exactly a usual suspect for the sensationalist true crime genre. Then again, Wang doesn’t seem much interested in adhering to any tabloidesque playbook, tossing cinematic tropes of both heroes and villains straight off the screen, a choice that ingeniously swings Mind Over Murder in a far more consequential — and ultimately existential - direction. Unlike the current crop of sleuthing journos bent on becoming the next Errol Morris, Wang is not looking to prove or disprove anything. The case has already been exhaustively laid out in numerous, decades-spanning trials and investigations (from which she deftly deploys footage), resulting in a 2009 DNA acquittal for every single member of the Beatrice Six. Rather, Wang’s come to the small-town scene of the crime to conduct contemporary, on-the-ground interviews, patiently probe the minds of all the living players and document the amateur players in a local theater production as they develop, wholly from courtroom transcripts, what they hope will be a source of truth and reconciliation. The real mystery that Wang has set out to solve is how both a community and a victim’s family can be split on the question of a person’s innocence even in the face of solid exonerating evidence — and whether it’s ever possible to dislodge a false narrative once it’s become insidiously ingrained in an individual’s identity. Denial, after all, is a form of self-preservation, whether you’re a grieving relative desperate for closure, an (in-over-your-head) investigator desperate to provide it for that loved one or a wrongly accused individual prone to manipulation by a desperately self-preserving authority figure. To try to get at some answers, Filmmaker turned to the empathetic, China-born-and-raised documentarian herself (who happens to know a thing or two about believing in false narratives propagated by self-preserving authority figures). Episodes of Mind Over Murder began dropping on HBO June 20.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.