This devastating tribute to a slain friend starts with a humble ambition, to tell a child about the beloved father he will never know. Reeling from the shock that his best friend has been murdered, Kuenne sets out to interview Andrew’s grieving friends and relatives, draws on the home movies they made together as kids, and outlines the case against the Newfoundland woman who immediately emerges as the prime suspect.

The documentary changes tack, though, when Andrew’s parents move up to St Johns to begin a custody battle for the baby, Zachary – a battle that requires them to spend weeks and months in intimate contact with the woman accused of killing their boy. Edited with dizzying skill, Dear Zachary is an intense true crime story, a heartbreaking memorial, and an impassioned polemic to the people of Canada.

Dear Zachary was nominated for Best Documentary by both the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Online Film Critics Society, who also nominated writer/director/composer Kurt Kuenne for Breakthrough Filmmaker of 2008. The International Film Music Critics also nominated his musical score for Best Documentary Score of 2008.

Kurt Kuenne is an award-winning filmmaker and composer of both fiction and documentary films. He grew up in Silicon Valley, where at age 7, he met the late Andrew Bagby. He began making films as soon as he was old enough to pick up a camera; these early films, all of which featured Andrew, became a treasure trove for this documentary.

As a composer, in addition to his own films his work includes re-scoring the restoration of the silent classic Cyrano de Bergerac (1925), for which the original score was lost. His score was premiered by the San Diego Symphony and has become a perennial fixture on Turner Classic Movies and French television. He also scored the Luke Wilson thriller Bad Seed (2000) and the Douglas Spain indie film Hunting of Man (2002).