10 LONGISLANDPRESS.COM • MARCH 2020
THIS MONTH
COVER FEATURE
DIRECTOR LIZ GARBUS FOCUSES ON GILGO
BY TIMOTHY BOLGER
Director Liz Garbus doesn’t fear giving
close-ups to tough topics, having
traveled the globe making documentaries
about everything from AIDS
to terrorism. More recently, she has
focused her lens on Long Island.
The Brooklyn-based, two-time Oscar
nominated documentarian is
making her feature narrative debut
with Lost Girls, a fi lm based on author
Robert Kolker’s true crime book
of the same name about the unsolved
Gilgo Beach murders in which 10 sets
of human remains were found along
Ocean Parkway a decade ago. It tells
the story of how Mari Gilbert, mother
of Shannan Gilbert — who police were
looking for when they discovered the
dumping ground — struggled to get
police to take her case seriously. The
fi lm starring Amy Ryan as Mari will
debut March 13 on Netfl ix, but it’s
already making waves.
“I hope just like the Golden State
Killer was recently found, that renewed
public interest can help push
this case forward and there will be
justice for these grieving families,”
says Garbus, referring to how author
Michelle McNamara’s book I'll Be
Gone in the Dark is credited with
helping lead to a 2018 arrest in that
California case that was unsolved for
four decades.
Garbus may already be on her
way. The same day in January
that Netflix released its trailer for
Lost Girls, Suffolk County police
held a news conference revealing
the first new evidence in the case
in nine years: a photo of the initials
“WH” (or HW”) embossed on a belt
they found at one of the dump sites.
Although police wouldn't say why
they decided to make the
announcement then,
Garbus suggests
the timing appears
too coincidental to
be a coincidence.
Will Lost Girls
ultimately find
answers to Suffolk’s
largest-ever
unsolved homicide case?
Time will tell.
Lost Girls isn’t your first film with
Long Island ties. So was There’s
Something Wrong With Aunt Diane
about the Diane Schuler case, Gloria
Vanderbilt biopic Nothing
Left Unsaid, and
the episode
of HBO’s
Addiction
series you directed about Brookhaven
National Lab’s brain imaging.
Why does LI keep showing up in
your work? I’m a New York Citybased
filmmaker. Long Island is my
backyard as well. A lot’s happened
there. I’ve worked on 50 or 60 films
throughout my lifetime, so it’s not
that I’m obsessed with one place, but
there are some stories that
need telling on Long
Island.
You grew up in New York City. Do
you have ties to LI? I have close family
members who have lived on Long
Island all my life. My uncle and cousins
all lived in Huntington.
How did you come to make Lost
Girls? It happened the way projects
can happen, which is my agent sent
me a script, I read it and said, ‘I want
to work on this fi lm.’ And that is where
it all started.
The book was published a year before
the focus of the fi lm, Mari Gilbert,
was murdered by another daughter,
Sara. Did you have a chance to meet
her while she was still alive? Yes. I did
meet Mari and her lawyer, John Ray,
before she died. So I’m very grateful
that I had the opportunity to do that.
How did that infl uence the fi lm? Mari
was very supportive of the fi lm. She
would talk a lot about herself and her
struggles and it gave me a lot of insight
into the character, which infl uenced
how we worked on the script and
how I worked with Amy Ryan on the
portrayal. So it was a really important
meeting.
Your work has primarily been documentaries.
Why did you decide to
make Lost Girls your fi rst narrative
feature? It was a story that I just felt
was incredibly important and timely.
I love telling stories. This was a story
that had been covered in documentary
form. But there was a kind of story of
Mari and a mother-daughter story
that hadn’t been told and this was the
way to tell it. I just became very passionate
about making this fi lm and it
was one of those passion projects that
I wouldn’t let go.
Suff olk police recently held a news
conference revealing new evidence,
new DNA techniques being
used to help ID fi ve unidentifi
ed victims in the case,
and launched a new
website, gilgonews.
com, to generate tips,
but police wouldn’t
say why they decided
to do this now. Do
you think they were
“There was a kind of story of Mari and a motherdaughter
story that hadn’t been told,”
says Liz Garbus.
Director Liz Garbus was nominated for Oscars for Best Documentary in 1999 and 2016 for The
Farm: Angola, USA, and What Happened, Miss Simone?, respectively.
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