Raising a School Shooter

What Is the Series About?

Raising a School Shooter is a 74-minute Danish documentary directed by siblings Frida Barkfors and Lasse Barkfors, released in 2021 on the Danish streaming platform Filmstriben and later broadcast internationally on BBC Four as part of its acclaimed Storyville documentary strand. The film does not focus on the shooters themselves or reconstruct the crimes in forensic detail. Instead, it turns the camera on the people left behind in the most complicated grief imaginable: the parents of the perpetrators. Three families — united by horror and by guilt they did not earn but cannot escape — sit for candid interviews that form the emotional and moral backbone of the film.

The documentary asks a question that is almost too painful to pose directly: how do ordinary parents raise a child who becomes capable of mass murder? It offers no clean answers, but it bears unflinching witness to the weight of that question.

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The Cases

Columbine High School Massacre (1999) — Sue Klebold and Dylan Klebold

On 20 April 1999, Dylan Bennet Klebold and his co-conspirator Eric Harris carried out the Columbine High School massacre in Jefferson County, Colorado, killing 13 people and wounding more than 20 others before both died by suicide. It remains one of the most studied and referenced school shootings in American history. Because Klebold died at the scene, no criminal trial was ever held for him.

In the documentary, Dylan's mother Sue Klebold speaks with devastating honesty about the son she thought she knew and the son the world came to know on 20 April 1999. Sue Klebold has spoken publicly before — she published a memoir, A Mother's Reckoning, in 2016 — but her presence in this film, alongside the parents of lesser-known shooters, reframes her story within a broader pattern of parental blindness, love, and retrospective anguish.

Santana High School Shooting (2001) — Jeff Williams and Andy Williams

On 5 March 2001, Andrew "Andy" Williams, then just 15 years old, opened fire at Santana High School in Santee, California. He killed two classmates and wounded 13 other students. Williams was tried as an adult and is currently serving life in prison.

In the documentary, his father Jeff Williams speaks on camera — a rare and striking act of public accountability for a parent in his position. His testimony does not excuse his son's actions, but it excavates the domestic landscape in which a teenager's suffering went unseen until it was catastrophic.

Atlantic Shores Christian School Shooting (1988) — Clarence Elliott and Nicholas Elliott

In December 1988, Nicholas Elliott shot and killed his teacher and wounded another person at Atlantic Shores Christian School in Virginia Beach. His father, Clarence Elliott, is the third parent featured in the film. The documentary's verified sources do not detail his current sentence or incarceration status, but the crime itself was among the earliest high-profile school shootings to prompt national debate about youth violence and gun access in American schools.

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Production

Directors Frida Barkfors and Lasse Barkfors are a Danish filmmaking duo known for intimate, character-driven documentary work. Their decision to centre the film entirely on parents — rather than survivors, investigators, or the shooters themselves — was a deliberate and somewhat controversial creative choice. Gaining access to Sue Klebold, whose public profile is significant, alongside lesser-known figures like Jeff Williams and Clarence Elliott, required building trust with subjects who had every reason to remain silent.

The film was produced with support from the Danish Film Institute and premiered through Filmstriben before reaching international audiences via BBC Four's Storyville strand on 7 July 2021. Its running time of 74 minutes is lean by documentary standards, a choice that keeps the film emotionally concentrated rather than diffuse.

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Reception

Critical reception was strongly positive. The Guardian awarded the film a glowing notice, calling it a "powerful depiction of nightmarish pain" — high praise for a documentary that risks being dismissed as either exploitative or exculpatory. The review recognized that the Barkfors siblings navigate an extraordinarily difficult subject with restraint and moral seriousness.

The New Statesman described the film as "profoundly moving", emphasizing its attention to the ordinary textures of daily life that continue — awkwardly, stubbornly — after tragedy. The film's focus on routine, on what parents remember about breakfast tables and school runs and report cards, gives it an emotional specificity that purely investigative documentaries rarely achieve.

On Reddit's Columbine-focused communities, the film was discussed extensively following its broadcast, suggesting it found a significant audience among viewers already immersed in the history of school shootings — viewers who brought both deep prior knowledge and, in some cases, strong opinions about how perpetrators and their families should be portrayed.

No major public controversy was attached to the film's release, though its premise — giving screen time and sympathetic framing to the parents of killers — is inherently tension-laden. Critics broadly concluded that the filmmakers handled this tension responsibly. The film carries an IMDb title ID of tt14515216, though no aggregate rating score was available in verified sources at the time of publication.

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The Cases Today

Andy Williams remains incarcerated and serving his life sentence for the 2001 Santana High School shooting. He has been the subject of periodic parole discussions in California, though his long-term status reflects the severity of his conviction as an adult for a crime committed at age 15.

Sue Klebold has continued her public advocacy work around mental health and suicide prevention in the years since Columbine, channelling her grief into systemic awareness efforts. She remains one of the most prominent voices willing to speak from the position of a perpetrator's parent.

The broader conversation that Raising a School Shooter contributes to — about parental responsibility, early warning signs, and the social and psychological conditions that precede mass violence — has only grown more urgent. School shootings in the United States have continued at a devastating rate since the documentary's release, and the question of what parents, schools, and communities miss, or choose not to see, remains as unresolved as ever.

For viewers seeking to understand not just what happened, but what was happening in the homes and families before it happened, Raising a School Shooter is essential documentary viewing.