The film sets out to accomplish an ambitious number of things from its beginning.

Themes of death, justice, recovery and liberation from trauma underlie the film through its narration and the visual language chosen to express the transformative journey by the author in facing their trauma and traumatizer in the course of a criminal trial.

You will be moved by where she begins the story and how she ends it. We do see a transformation that is expertly supported by the director and editor's choices. Despite its shortcomings it is a film that should be seen by as many in America as possible.

There was a lost opportunity to explore what justice means to the author. We are presented with juxtapositions of the present day with images from Nuremberg, for example, and it is hard to ignore the feeling that there is no real delineation between justice and revenge for the author. The film does not dwell upon the death penalty explicitly, but the visual equivocations presented to us outweigh that fact enough to mention.

To be clear, the criticism here is not that one political opinion or another is held; if anything it is that this element has been held back, and minimized. This comes at the cost of allowing an audience to more fully understand where Ms. Fuentes is in her life. After all, this is a documentary crafted around crime and punishment. It stands to reason this should loom larger in the film. It is understandable that the danger of making it seem like a pro-death penalty propaganda film is a legitimate concern, but then that's why we call documentary filmmaking an art.

It should be kept in mind that this film is very much a visceral, and personal statement. The author is still in college, and it's clear there are a lot of things they have yet to confront about this event in their life.

We do not see this movie from the perspective of someone in their 30s with the benefit of a little more psychosocial development and therapy. That's okay. We must take the author as they are, and this film does a very admirable job at allowing us to look at what she was ready to show the world about herself, and about the repeated tragedy that is school shootings in America.

It is done poetically, dangerously, and with great courage. As such, I give it 8 stars.

The documentary is a form of non-fiction storytelling that aims to present factual information, insights, and perspectives on real-world subjects, events, issues, or people. Documentaries can cover a wide range of topics, including history, science, culture, social issues, nature, biographies, and more.

Dziga Vertov in Man with a Movie Camera (1929)

The short form refers to creative works characterized by their brevity and concise storytelling. Unlike full-length feature films, short films have a running time of less than 45 minutes, while TV shorts have a running time of less than 22 minutes.

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