Awards Daily talks to Madison Hamburg, director of the HBO documentary Murder on Middle Beach, which follows Hamburg’s attempt to find out what happened to his mother, who was murdered in 2010.
Madison Hamburg’s parents, Jeffrey and Barbara Hamburg, gave him his first camera on Christmas Day when he was 11 years old, the day after they told him they were getting divorced.
“It’s sort of been the thing I’ve always been good at or had an aptitude for,” said Hamburg of filmmaking. “As a kid, not knowing how to process loss, grief, or divorce, I got lost in filming everything. It was a form of coping.”
Hamburg’s HBO documentary, Murder on Middle Beach, might be the ultimate form of coping, as it tracks his mother’s life before she was tragically murdered in 2010. The series captivated audiences with its real-life twists and turns, culminating in the final episode with Hamburg’s heartbreaking conversation with the main suspect in the murder: his father.
“The last time I talked to my dad is on camera, in the last episode. I have a lot of questions that are still unanswered.”
‘Did You Kill My Mom?’
Back in 2010, after his mother died, Hamburg took a year off, dealing with addiction and grief, before attending the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD), where he first started what would become the HBO documentary series in a Documentary 101 class.
“I didn’t want to be the kid whose mom was murdered. I didn’t want it to define me. So when I was in the documentary class, it was the first time that I had divulged to my classmates that my mom had died. I saw it as an opportunity to immortalize her, because at that point I was really fearful that I was going to lose her memory or my memory of her. And after asking questions, I realized I was grieving someone I didn’t know, and I became obsessed with that.”
Hamburg remarked that he can see the evolution of his filmmaking through the series, where it starts as amateurish, trying to interview as many people as possible, and then starts to hone in on something really intentional with a “fly on the wall” style of filmmaking.
“My biggest fear was creating something exploitive. True crime, as a subgenre, has a tendency to fetishize brutal crimes and characterize real people. I realized I need to invite the audience in and my goal became giving proper weight to a question like, ‘Did you kill my mom?’ That became our mission statement moving forward.”
Getting to Know Barbara
As Hamburg said, Murder on Middle Beach became not only a way of trying to figure out what happened to his mother, but also a way of getting to know her. Working on the project shed light on what would become important sections of the documentary.
“I didn’t even know about the gifting tables. I didn’t know a lot. I never got to know my mom as a human being. The documentary was a source for discovering Barbara.”
But given that documentaries are often supposed to be objective, Hamburg tried to separate himself from having confirmation bias when it came to the murder investigation.
“I have been really careful not to have a hunch. Because I think that’s often what goes wrong in initial investigations. Playing the game of numbers and statistics. I think something that really became clear to me—it comes back to that fear of exploiting people in my family who are participating—is that everybody has skeletons in the closet, the conflicts that happen in our lives and our responses to them, and it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a murderer. And I think that was something really important to me, to not attach myself to one scenario.”
Through the years, he felt like a double agent, as he didn’t reveal to many about his work on the project. And yet despite the fear of exploiting his family and their stories, Hamburg found that the project actually united them, especially in the final episode of the series.
“My mom was one of six and was the person who was the glue between a lot of familial barriers. When she died, our family at first realized that we were far too distant, but her death being left unsolved created this trust between people who are supposed to love each other unconditionally. I at first was trying to bring people together, and I could tell, especially between my sister and my aunt, there was going to be a climax to their conflict. I do think ultimately it has brought us together, aside from my dad.”
He is also closer to finding out what happened, as his mother’s murder case has “the most momentum it’s had in at least five years.”
“When the documentary came out, [we received tips] on a daily basis. Now, I’d say it’s multiple times a week. I have all of these case files.”
Murder on Middle Beach is available on HBOMax.
