Dear Zachary is a both a touching tribute to a fallen friend and a heart-wrenching account of justice gone astray, skillfully put to film with no emotion spared.
The above words are the critics consensus on Rotten Tomatoes of the 2008 documentary film Dear Zachary and I honestly can’t think of a better way to describe it. To put it very simply Zachary is a tale of two films one being a tribute to a friend and another about the mishandling of a psychotic person who should have been in jail. The film starts with the death of Dr. Andrew Bagby a seemingly good man who was taken way too soon from our planet. He was a great friend to everyone he met and seemed like the type of person that would help if you needed it. He ends up getting in a relationship with a much older woman named Shirley Turner. When he breaks up with Turner she kills him.
This spawned off Kurt Kuenne’s journey across America and Canada to interview all of Andrew’s closest family and friends about the times they enjoyed with him. The film takes a twist though when we find out that Shirley is pregnant with Andrew’s child. This takes the film in a different direction. Now that Andrew is death and will leave the child fatherless Kurt decides to create a video library of interviews of all of Andrew’s closest friends and family for the unborn child to one day look at as a way to get to know his father.
What’s brilliant about Dear Zachary and why it’s above a lot of documentaries of similar fashion is the relentless editing. The editing in this film is savage. Emotionally you will be drained after watching this film because the editing takes you from one moment to the next without any breath and leaves you wanting to take a break. It’s a pretty brutal film not pulling any punches but still being very respectful to Andrew’s family. Kurt after all was a friend but that didn’t stop him from making a soft documentary.
This film is truly a testament though to a faulty justice system and why it needs changes. There are some moments in this film that are unbelievable and almost unbearable to watch. In my idea’s I think people are generally good creatures but after watching this I was left uncertain. It’s such an explosion of intense emotional action that it’s hard to even grade a film like this. It is emotionally manipulative but it has to be. In order to get it’s message across and changes made it has to give an emotional response that is completely resonant in everyone.
I think that Dear Zachary is one of the more emotionally taxing films to ever come out and one of the finer documentaries of the 00’s. There aren’t many problems with the film and it is something that everyone should watch at least once. It’s a film I don’t think I’ll ever personally re-visit because it’s one of the saddest films I’ve ever watched but my praise for this film will be continued all through my life. It’s a testament to documentary filmmaking and although it isn’t as good a film as some of the finer documentaries ever made it’s still something we should all see.
