The scenes with Madison talking to Jeffrey are secretly filmed and recorded and by the end of the documentary, Jeffrey is not happy that he’s been secretly filmed. The series features a lot of tension as Madison asks sensitive questions of his family members, but none had more tension than Madison’s interviews with his father Jeffrey as he continuously dodged questions relating Barbara’s murder. Among the secrets that get drawn out in the film are mysterious financial dealings from his father, strong animosity between family members and aspects of Barbara’s life including alcoholism, recovering from it and involvement in a multi-level marketing scheme. The crime has yet to be solved and Madison spends the documentary not only looking for answers as to who may have committed the crime, but also discovering things about his mother that he never knew. “ Murder on Middle Beach,” which can currently be streamed on HBO Max, features Madison telling the story of how his mother was murdered in his Connecticut hometown in 2010. It was a sort of escapism at that point, but it helped me develop a language for communicating a lot of stuff that I can’t properly articulate.” “I sort of like lost myself and just filming the world around me. From that moment on, Madison would use film as a coping mechanism for when things got difficult in his life. “My parents told me that they were getting divorced the day before Christmas when I was 11 and on Christmas Day they bought me a Handycam,” Hamburg tells Gold Derby at our Meet the Experts: Television Documentary panel ( watch the exclusive video interview above). It was shining a light on the elephant in the room, and maybe it's selfish and maybe it's something that I was doing for me at others' expense, but to me, you have to talk about the elephant if you ever want the elephant to leave.Years before she was murdered, Madison Hamburg’s mother Barbara Hamburg gave him a gift that would shape his life forever. “Asking the hard questions unearthed resentments,” he continues, “and it brought to the surface the distrust that nobody wanted to talk about, but was always there. He adds, “the hardest thing for me was the reality that the documentary itself could be destructive,” especially knowing what it could ultimately do to his family, who opened up to him on camera. And so all of a sudden I realized I was grieving someone, I didn't know,” he says of the eight-year journey that led him down an unexpected path of uncovering family secrets, deep-seated resentments, connections to a multi-level marketing scheme and confronting law enforcement about the lack of evidence to charge or convict someone - possibly a member of his own family - responsible for his mother’s death.ĭespite Barbara’s involvement in the “Gifting Table,” which purported to uplift women but was really a pyramid scheme, or her strained relationships with her sister, Madison believes “she was making a lot of decisions out of desperation, out of coercion and just wanting truly the best for her children.” “But when I started asking questions, I realized that I didn’t really know Barbara and the conflicts and complexity and grayness of who she was as a human being.
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