Streamers have made it easy to fulfill a craving for crime content with lots of documentaries and docuseries about scammers, swindlers, kidnappers and killers. However, there are some recent highlights of the genre that are worth seeking out.
First up, documentarian Nanfu Wang breaks into the true crime docuseries space with the HBO miniseries “Mind Over Murder,” which premiered on June 20, and will be rolling out over six weeks. Wang is the director of three Oscar-shortlisted films, the COVID-19 pandemic film “In the Same Breath,” “One Child Nation,” an intimate look at China’s one-child policy, and the harrowing portrait of Chinese activist “Hooligan Sparrow.” In “Mind Over Murder,” she turns her view toward a notorious murder in Beatrice, Neb., where the group of people who confessed to the murder of grandmother Helen Wilson were later exonerated.
Wang uses an interesting device to explore the details of the case, casting local actors from Beatrice in a play about the murder. The casting, rehearsal and staging of the play become a part of the process of telling the story of this confounding case, and examining the way in which storytelling is a part of both the investigative process and the ways in which we understand these events through true crime.
Premiering on Netflix is the newest film from Skye Borgman, who directed the shocking Netflix hit “Abducted in Plain Sight.” Her latest film, “The Girl in the Picture,” is about a tragic death of a young mother, and the subsequent kidnapping of her son from his foster parents by her husband, a federal fugitive. As investigators look into her death and his kidnapping, questions about her identity arise, and about the decadeslong crime spree and many aliases her husband left in his wake.
