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| Sam Fuentes in Death By Numbers |
Among the five films nominated for this year’s Best Documentary Short Film Oscar is Kim Snyder’s Death By Numbers, written by and starring Sam Fuentes, a public speaker and human rights advocate who, as a teenager, was caught up in the school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in which 17 of her friends died. The film explores Sam’s subsequent struggle with trauma and the trial at which she confronted her attacker. it’s built around her poetry, giving it a very different tone from other works of this sort.
Kim has made several films about school shootings before, including Newtown, about the community response to children being killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, and Notes From Dunblane: Lessons From A School Shooting. When we met to discuss the new film, I asked about her wider interest in the subject and why this particular story stood out to her.
“That's a good question,” she says. “I started working in this terrain 12 years ago now with my producing partner Maria Cuomo Cole, and getting very close in relationships with the people who I got to know in Newtown, Connecticut, understanding the level of trauma that comes out of an event like this made me half filmmaker, half advocate. And it was hard. I did that for three or so years, and then I couldn't let it go. It's just such an unjust and crazy, horrible, avoidable thing in a country that you feel part of a family, part of a movement. And I almost felt like, for the rest of my life, I was dedicated, whether I made films about it or not, to advocating for change in this way.
“I'm a storyteller, so even though I tried to do something else after that, life, kismet kept drawing me back, These strange, happenstantial things would happen. I was working on another project and I ended up in Florida when Sam's shooting happened. I was literally there with a camera, on something else, and so people said ‘Well, obviously you're meant to tell the story of these kids now.’ So that happened. And then I got to know Sam really well, and we decided there was this other story, and it was a different way in. It was about not just about guns, but standing up to hate. Moving through the trial of her shooter was different territory. And so that's how I ended up being involved in so many in a row, in the trajectory of these things.”
This is the first time that a survivor of a school shooting has been involved in making a film about her experience.
“I think what is unique about this story is that oftentimes when these atrocities happen and these mass shootings occur, the stories of the aftermath of the people affected quickly leave the headlines,” says Sam. “They get reduced to statistics and numbers, and we forget about what happens to these people even after they've survived this sort of experience. And so it’s telling the story from the stance of a survivor who has lived to tell the tale, but also it’s in a unique sort of position, because I feel like it lends a lot of insight on how the grief and the trauma remains indefinitely and sort of ripples as you move on.
“The trial was a very re-traumatising event and I didn't get to necessarily choose if I wanted to be there or not, so telling it from a survivor standpoint was really important because it ultimately was revealing some truths about a traumatised youth, a generation of kids who are fearing for their lives indefinitely. And I know that there's plenty of us who can relate to a lot of those feelings of isolation, alienation, guilt. I want it to be known that even when you've had something so impossible and nonsensical happen to you, you can still stand up for what is right, and you can own your narrative and your story, and that can be a path to empowerment.”
The two of them have taken the decision to really decenter the shooter in this and not to name him. Often when we talk about incidents of violence, everything's focused on the perpetrator, and the victims are secondary characters. Was it important to her to put herself back at the centre of what happened?
“I think so,” she says. “Especially because oftentimes these shooters get so much attention. It's so sensationalised and they get a lot of glorification, and there's such a fascination with them as sort of these specimens to be studied. And I think that really gets away from the real devastation they've caused. And it’s a lens that I don't think really is all that interesting. Also, these individuals are not unique. They fit into an archetype, and they have all of the same sort of traits and behaviors.
“Often, really, what we were searching for was accountability and was to understand that these people belong to a larger framework of hatred, and it's sort of this ideology they're subscribed to. So recentering the survivors in the narrative, I think is so important because these are often the people who are devastated most, and their stories need to be documented. And I think there's no need to explore something that's already been exhausted.”
I ask Kim about the practical challenges of making the film when it was, of course, important to avoid doing anything which might compromise the legal processes then still in motion.
“We didn't really know we were going to make this film,” she reveals. “We had a relationship. I wanted to support Sam no matter what in moving through this. We were friends then. She showed me her writing, and the writing had a lot to do with. It had a lot to do with honouring her friends who had been slain, but it also had to do with empowering herself in this process. And so when I first went to the court, it wasn't with the knowledge that we were going to make this movie, necessarily. We started documenting Sam in and around it like, ‘Let's just see.’
“The part that I was very aware of was that her teacher, Ivy [Schamis], is someone I had a relationship with. They were subpoenaed separately, so we stayed very back because we didn’t want to compromise or intervene in any way with what was happening, both in terms of the trial, but also Sam's process and what she needed I trusted that more because we had years of navigating it, and I learned enough about her and how trauma works that she knows her boundaries very well. And so if something was too much or she didn't want to talk about it, that's been established. And most of the times those conversations would look like Sam saying, ‘You know, I think about this all the time, every day anyway, so I'll let you know if something is crossing a boundary in terms of retraumatizing me.’
“Really, the film was made after the fact, when we started really looking at her writing, looking at what had happened in the court and constructing something through her interviews that was poetic and used a lot of metaphor, but it really was about then taking the spine of her writing as a script and then taking what came before it and threading it together.”
“I think in terms of my own healing, writing has always been in the forefront of how I've coped,” Sam says. “I think also something about the nature of poetry and allegory and short story, these different forms of writing that I tend to deal with in the abstract and in metaphor work. I find it makes it much easier to put my feelings and trauma in that framework because, for me, it becomes more digestible when I have something to compare, contrast or, in terms of my own feelings, like, document. Documenting it in this sort of artful form makes it easier to move through, and it makes the trauma more fluid and much more malleable to my own touch and to my own manipulation.
“Death By Numbers, I think, was really just a piece of writing that I wrote in response of what was unfolding, which was the sentencing trial. I was revisiting a lot of my memories and having to recall a lot of things as a result of having to testify and as a result of seeing a lot o my peers and community members who I hadn't seen in years because I'd moved away. I think when you move through life and you've gone through a trauma or an adverse event, you keep score and you keep tally of everything, and you sort of push it aside and then you have these grand events that bring it right back to the surface. So I think Death By Numbers was a very reactionary piece of writing.
“In addition to that, as the trial started to unfold and as we were working on it and incorporating the writing into the film as this through line, I actually wrote additional writings to supplement and help bring those pieces together. Especially when we were talking about these specific themes of hatred. Some of those stanzas were written post the original Death By Numbers to help the film, so the film in itself was also this place of empowerment because I was able to control my own narrative and tell my own story within my own terms. I was given permission to do so in the way that I liked, which was in the form of poetry. So I think it's always been a tool for me. And I think for me, writing it down is a way that I'm able to wield my own strength.”
They’ve spoken before about the general numbness that American society has towards this kind of incident. Is their work a constant process of looking for new ways to cut through to people and make a difference?
“For me it is,” says Kim. “As a storyteller, it's how do we break through the inevitable numbing of American society to gun violence? And I felt that Sam's voice and her words are something that can pierce through the kind of a droning that is now so frighteningly normalised. We have come to expect it to the point where there's an acceptance of ‘Oh, well, I guess we just have to make our schools safer.’
“No. We once had an assault weapon ban. There are statistics that prove that certain policy changes can reduce gun violence. Red flag laws. There are these things other countries like the UK did after Dunblane. We didn't do those things. And so the advocate in me wants to keep trying to find a new tool to jolt people into understanding this is the number one killer of youth in America.
“There's so many who die, but there's so many Sams who are left for the rest of their lives to deal with this. So, yes, I felt like Sam's voice was unique and singular and different in how we approached it. That's what we do through the best of art, to pierce through and reach people in a new way.”
Their Oscar nomination has come at the same time as politics in America is undergoing a dramatic shift. Nobody really knows how things are going to develop. Do they have any thoughts about these two things happening at once, and if there's any possibility of positive change coming out of it all?
“I think it depends for me on your theory of social change,” says Kim. “If you're looking for the magic bullet, that suddenly Congress, in this environment, is going to give us really positive change...” She trails off. “The way I see it, that's not the way to define it. But the conversation is changing. I've seen it since Newtown. People say nothing happened, nothing ever will. I've seen the rise of youth coming out in a different way. I've seen people of Sam's age convince their parents of something different. I've seen doctors and law enforcement and priests and teachers come out and speak in a different way than they did 15 years ago, 10 years ago. And so there can be behavioural and cultural shifts of people on their own, as Sam points out.”
“With my films, I've had men come up to me who say ‘I'm a gun owner and I'm an NRA member and you've changed the way I see my relationship with guns. And because of that, I'm at least going to think harder about making sure they're safe.’ There's behavioural things that these kinds of stories can do, especially if people don't feel threatened that this is about coming to get their guns. So I do have hope that, you know, of course I want legislative change and policy change, but I think there are other ways to measure how things can change. I don't know how you feel about that, Sam.”
“I think that's exactly right,” Sam says. “I think also the conversation on gun violence is so polarising and divisive, and I think when we have more stories of very normal, average people going through gun violence, and you’re watching the domino effect on an entire community in this very personal light, it very much humanises the issue in a way that we don't recognise, we don't really see often.
“My experience is that working in the advocacy space, a lot of people just assume that you want the extreme, which is to completely ban guns and to take them away from people. But the truth is, I think there is a more middle of the road, moderate conversation that we can be having that is rooted in real human experiences, which serve as evidence that it is a problem, but also connect us to understand the problems more intimately and in a way that's empathic.
“I think that's the big thing, for a lot of people like myself. Before I'd gotten shot in my high school, I just assumed that, oh, that would never happen in my town. That would never happen to me because I do this and I live here, and I stick within the lines that I have to. What people don't understand is that whatever world that you think you live in, whatever lines you think you're inside of, guns will literally shoot right through it. And you don't really get to choose that. But if you can enter a society that is more conscious of preventative action, to handle guns safely... I think that starts with having a vulnerable conversation about what it does to people so that people can connect the dots and understand the real impact.”
“One of the campaigns that I always thought was so smart, that kind of illustrates what we're talking about, about behavioral change, was the Ask Campaign,” says Kim. “It simply was saying ‘Why don't you start asking your kids’ friends’ parents, if they're going to a sleepover, ‘I just want to know – if my child's going to sleep there – do you have guns in the house? Because I'm concerned, and I hope you don't mind me asking, but it's sort of my business to know that.’ Just so people can have regular conversations, outside of politics, about real situations. And they could either say, ‘Go to hell,’ or they could say ‘Oh, okay, I'm glad you asked. I do have guns, but I keep them very safely.’
“It makes it possible to have dialogues between people. It also asserts it actually is my business to know and decide if I want my child in a place that I feel is less safe. Anyhow, I think there's lots of ways that we can start working together, because the truth of it is that the vast amount of American gun owners agree on a lot more than politics would have you think. Background checks. Even assault weapons. I think more and more people are really questioning why civilians need to have them. Most Americans agree more than disagree on what's happening in America with guns.”
Finally, I ask Sam what the process of making the film, and it getting the attention that it has, has meant to her, and what she thinks it will mean to other survivors.
“I always felt that Death By Numbers was much larger than the film itself,” she says. “It was much larger than us and even my own singular story. The hope is that, for one thing, people like myself, survivors of gun violence, can feel in some way like they can relate and they can be empowered by a film like this, and think more critically about their own trauma journey and work through it in a way that serves them.
“A large part of this is also just upholding and honouring those that we’ve lost in a way that was really thoughtful, and also bringing truth to power. You know, encouraging people to call out blatant bigotry and intolerance when they see it. And even when you're a survivor of a traumatic event, there's still light and empowerment and justice there, especially restorative justice within yourself. There's still control that you can get back by simply telling your story and being honest with your own narrative. I think people really relate to vulnerability.
“The hope is really that people watch Death By Numbers and think more critically about the issues that are discussed, but also think more critically about the people who are impacted directly by it.”
