‘AFTER’ EFFECTS
Parkland film shows unity of survivors, kin
Joaquin Oliver never got the chance to graduate with his classmates at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
He didn’t get to compete for a basketball championship with his teammates, take his girlfriend Victoria to prom or move to Orlando for college with his best friends.
Joaquin was one of the 17 people killed in the horrific shooting at the Parkland, Fla., school on Feb. 14, 2018. Seventeen others were injured.
Now over a year later, his family, friends and others in that community continue to advocate for change. Joaquin, who was just 17 when he died, is prominently featured in a powerful new documentary, “After Parkland,” covering the aftermath of the tragedy.
“Nobody wants to be part of this documentary,” Joaquin’s father, Manuel Oliver, told the Daily News. “That’s something that we have to be very clear about. We happen to be part of this documentary, and I think that at this point, after a little more than a year after losing our son, it’s a good thing to send the message of what could happen to anybody randomly.”
The film, which is directed and produced by Emily Taguchi and Jake Lefferman, centers on several survivors of the attack and multiple parents of victims as they go through life in Parkland in the months after the shooting.
The documentary makes its world premiere Friday at 6 p.m. at the Tribeca Film Festival. It covers the grieving, the unity of the community and students and parents of Parkland campaigning for causes such as gun control and school safety.
“For us, it was not about making an advocacy film or a political documentary,” Lefferman told The News. “We really hoped to give the audience insight into more of the human side of what these families went through afterwards.”
Brooke Harrison, 15, was inside the first classroom to be attacked by the gunman. Her good friend, Alaina Petty, was one of the students fatally shot in that room.
Now a sophomore, Harrison says the mourning process is ongoing and features daily difficulties.
“I hope that [viewers] understand that as soon as the news goes away, it doesn’t mean that we stop hurting, and that what we’re going through is a daily thing. I get flashbacks and I get sad on a daily basis. I get angry. I get upset. It’s a daily thing.”
A little over a month after the one-year anniversary of the Parkland shooting, a 2018 graduate of the high school, Sydney Aiello, took her own life. That same month, 16-yearold Calvin Desir, who also survived the shooting, died in an apparent suicide. Joaquin’s mother, Patricia, says Aiello was a friend of her son.
Taguchi and Lefferman spent much of February through September in Parkland working on the film. They opted to focus on that stretch of time because the 2018 senior class graduation felt like the end of a chapter there.
The documentary features scenes of the town rallying around the high school. Among those moments is the night Joaquin’s basketball team returned to the court for after his death and wore jerseys with his nickname, “Guac,” written on them.
“It’s those intimate moments where it’s a struggle and yet they’re also coming together and being together and finding community with each other that was so striking,” Taguchi said.
The film addresses other mass shootings in the U.S. since the Parkland attack, including at Sante Fe High School in Texas, where 10 people were killed last May, and at the Capital Gazette newspaper in Annapolis, Md., where five people lost their lives in June.
“At the end of the documentary, it shows perfectly how this is not over,” Manuel said. “It’s not only about Joaquin. It’s about 40,000 people that die every year. Do something about it.”