Dunblane Tapes Review – A deeply moving film that reveals parents’ grief 30 years after the tragedy | television

TThirty years on, the Dunblane Massacre remains almost unbelievable, and the grief of the families remains incomprehensible. In a terrible way, it’s hard to see them now, three decades later; They have lived three decades without children who should now be growing up, with families of their own.

On March 13, 1996, a man named Thomas Hamilton shot 15 elementary school students, ages five and six, and their teacher Gwen Mayor in their gym as they were starting a physical education lesson. Some of them fired from close range when they were incapacitated by previous bullets. The sixteenth child died on his way to the hospital.

The documentary marking the anniversary of the event, The Dunblane Tapes, retells the story as quietly and unsentimentally as you’d hope. The film shows contemporary news footage sparingly but effectively – parents running through the streets towards school, some still wearing their slippers, huddling to await news, a policeman bowing his head and covering his eyes as he arrives. Journalist Melanie Reid, an early reporter who arrived at the scene, recalls seeing a woman driving behind her on the road suddenly covering her mouth in horror while she clearly heard the news over her car radio.

The title bars refer to video recordings made by John Crozier, who lost his five-year-old daughter, Emma, ​​in the aftermath of his loss. He documented some gatherings of bereaved parents, many of his conversations with his friend Les Morton, who had also lost his five-year-old daughter Emily, and the continuation of family life around their loss – the bewildered siblings who had to be cared for, the arrival of new people, along with the thousands of little things that still make up a day even when it seems as if they should all stop. We see Jack, Emma’s three-year-old brother, and the imaginary tray of cookies he made with her grandmother. He plans to grow up to be a “big baker.”

The two men are sitting together on the sofa now, with white hair and remembering what happened. Les says he was upset about being interrupted in the meeting. Then they told him there had been a shooting at the school. “I said-Say that again?” In the tapes John, dark-haired and radiant with sadness and anger, talks about how he sees Emma’s face in front of him every morning when he wakes up. “Is it like the picture?” John asks – and what a terrifying shared understanding that allows him to ask the question. “No, it’s like a living picture,” says Lees. You can see him visibly suffering from his horrific situation before he speaks again. “Nobody thinks it’s possible,” he says. “I still don’t think this is possible…I feel angry every day. My child is gone. He will never be seen again.”

Other fathers were seen, then and now, including Mick North. He also lost his five-year-old daughter, Sophie. They lost her mother to illness just three years ago. You want to ask him how he took it, how he’s still standing, but that’s a question that’s probably beyond even John’s privilege to ask.

The stories of the bereaved are intertwined with the story of the only tangible good that has emerged from their immeasurable suffering. It started with the Snowdrop petition – named after the flowers that were the only ones in bloom in Dunblane in early March when the children died. It was fired by Anne Burston, who couldn’t get past the fact that assault rifles had been banned after the Hungerford shooting, but not the handguns the killer also used, which were actually more lethal and which Hamilton had legally possessed. “He didn’t do anything wrong until he fired the first shot,” says Jacqueline Walsh, who along with another friend of Piston’s, Rosemary Hunter, soon joined the petition. It quickly developed into a public campaign to ban the possession of handguns for all ordinary citizens.

They gained cross-party support, faced off against a well-organised and well-financed pro-gun lobby, and ultimately – aided by the 1997 general election that brought Tony Blair’s Labor government to power and reduced the control of the kind of men who thought any infringement of their right to arms was atrocious – got the complete ban they sought.

It was an astonishing achievement at the time, and it seems even more so now, 14 years after the killing of 20 six- and seven-year-olds and six staff at Sandy Hook Elementary School in the US failed to bring about any changes to US gun laws at all. “I really admire these three women,” John says. “Absolutely,” says Liz.

It seems to have brought them a measure of peace. But of course, as John told the press at the time: “It’s hard to think about anything in terms of winning and losing when you lose your only child.”