Beautiful Something Left Behind Will Change How You Talk About Death

By Alex Gonzalez


Any time director Katrine Philp's sister-in-law fell ill, she felt despair and sadness watching her family member grapple with the emotional pain. Her sister-in-law was suffering from what Philp describes as “bacteria running berserk in her body” and if she survived, Philp says her recovery was a lengthy, strenuous process.


“I watched how she was struggling with her life, while my brother and their three children were by her side, for a very, very, very long time,” Philp tells MTV News. “It was very hard for the full family member. I watched my family member, and I might visualize their powerlessness."


Watching this struggle "planted the seed" for Philp's Beautiful Something Left Behind, from MTV Documentary Films, that follows an audience of children as each of those process the death of one or both parents. The idea grew as Philp heard a story similar to the one she experienced while listening to an episode of NPR’s “This American Life” about firms that help those grieving. That’s how she discovered Good Grief, a nonprofit distributing mental health resources to bereaved children and their families based in Morristown, New Jersey.


Philp chatted with CEO Joe Primo by means of the Skype in May 2018, long before video chatting became the new typical in the time of COVID-19. Production on the film was completed before the pandemic struck, nevertheless its release is more timely than ever, because the world emerges from a moment of collective trauma. Primo immediately fell in love with Philp’s vision, citing her “gentleness and warmth” as reasons he trusted her to film at the facility. “I think her character is so much what takes up the film and makes it as pretty as it is,” Primo tells MTV News. 


Good Grief was founded in 2004 by a crowd of volunteers who wanted to serve as advocates for grieving children. Today, the nonprofit offers support groups for children who have lost parents, and also for surviving adults. Moreover, they coordinate activities for children, as Philp tenderly showcases while in the film, like setting up headstones in a sandbox, blowing off steam in a “volcano room” where they can cry and scream if they can’t find the words to express their feelings, and saying goodbye to a teddy bear patient in a hospital room.


While it might be comforting to tell a child that their parent has gone to heaven, Good Grief takes a more upfront and secular approach to explain death, allowing the child to process the fact that their parent will no longer be present physically.


“At Good Grief, we talk about death being a biological event,” Primo says. “I've heard numerous iterations where somebody will mention, ‘Mommy is in heaven,’ although then night a few days later, they're standing around a coffin, in a cemetery. Everybody's crying and the child is like, ‘Wait, if Mommy's in heaven, who's in the box? Why are we here? What is this about?’ And that's because of how adults teach and converse with children about death.”


Philp’s partner, Adam Morris Philp, served because the film’s cinematographer. Over the course of each year, they visited Good Grief [from their house in Copenhagen] three times a week, talking to kids in the program. While in the last four months of filming, they moved to Morristown, bringing their two children with them.


While filming, their children would remain beyond the scenes, nevertheless as soon as the cameras were off, they played with the Good Grief kids. “When you are portraying families in one of these situations, you can imagine how complicated it may would be to have a film crew there,” Philp says. “I think coming there as a family member and not as a crew helped a lot to increase their trust and to have them relaxed in the scenario and to get close to them.”


While in the production of Beautiful Something Left Beyond in 2018, Philp’s father died unexpectedly. As a child, she remembers being close to him, never leaving his side. She didn’t expect she would have to process her own loss while documenting the children, giving her a new admiration for the strength of the children to be open about their own losses. Navigating that with each other felt therapeutic, inspiring her to tell the story from the children’s perspective.


“I think that the kids in the film show us what we need to know about grief,” Philp says. “I had the feeling that subsequently, people could Google [Good Grief] and ask, ‘Are there any [similar] places near me?’ It was critical for me to prepare this film as a journey into the grief of the children. Grief isn't a linear process. It's much more like fragments. And some days you're happy and everything is beneficial, and the next moment you're sad. So I wanted to also to work with the foundation of the film, and be inspired by the voice of the children.”


The film captures the children in various raw states of emotional recovery. Some can’t get through sort meetings without crying; others admit that they haven’t cried. In one scene, a boy who has lost both his parents sends two balloons into the sky, seemingly up to heaven to his parents. One balloon “for Mommy” gets caught in a tree, and his guardian tells him, “Mommy wanted her balloon to live with you for a little bit while.”


Beautiful Something Left Beyond won SXSW’s Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary last year, where it was originally set to premiere before the conference was canceled because of the onset of the coronavirus. The pandemic has also affected operations at Good Grief, where children and adults have not been able to have in-person meetings. According to Primo, the nonprofit immediately pivoted to a virtual platform while in the early days of lockdown. For their summer camp, which is traditionally contained over a week-long period in August, it contained a virtual camp while in the entirety of last year’s summer months.


The past year was one of loss for several people, and Philp hopes Beautiful Something Left Beyond encourages viewers to talk directly about their emotions and reach out to people who are struggling. Any time her father died, Philp says people would avoid talking about her father as a way to be sensitive about her loss. This, although, made Philp feel more lonely.


“I think that we need to be there for each other,  care for each other, and show all of the compassion that we can,” Philp says. “Because any time you're in grief, it is so isolating. It might be such an isolating feeling if you're not sharing it with anybody. I really hope that this film will make us all braver as soon as we encounter people who have lost, and not be afraid of talking about our emotions and sharing our experiences.”