EXCLUSIVE: The director of The Many Deaths of Nora Dalmasso tells Deadline about the remarkable real-life connection he had to a case that is the subject of his Netflix true-crime series.
“I went to Argentina as an 18 year-old on my gap year trying to learn Spanish and I ended up teaching English in a small farming city right in the center of the country,” Jamie Crawford says in his first English-language interview about the series. “Ten years after I was there, a terrible crime occurred. A woman was murdered and she was the best friend of the family that I lived with.”
The woman was Nora Dalmasso and her unsolved murder is one Argentina’s most infamous crime stories. As the family of the victim faced the unrelenting glare of the media, Crawford, who, in the intervening years became a director with credits including Trainwreck: Woodstock ‘99, stayed away. “I remained in touch with friends and people from that community. I was watching it from afar and actually not going near it because of those friendships. I knew that it was a very sensitive story.”
That changed four years ago, when he got word that family members were thinking about telling their stories. He started talking to them and it took 18 months before Dalmasso’s husband, Marcelo Macarrón, and children, Facundo and Valentina, committed to putting their accounts on film. While some true-crime seeks to unearth new evidence or find a culprit, Crawford wanted to understand the impact on a family thrust into the spotlight.
“My job was not to solve the case and I always said that to them, that’s not my mission. I want to find out what this is like for you. That was the same question for the journalists, for the lawyers, it was understanding that personal experience.”
A Case That Gripped The Nation
Dalmasso was found dead in her home in 2006, in a well-to-do suburb of Río Cuarto in the Córdoba Province. She had been strangled. From a prominent family, Dalmasso was raised in affluent surroundings and was a well-known figure locally. Several people have been charged with her killing over the years, including Gastón Zárate, a painter who worked on the family’s house renovations and whose arrest sparked widespread protests. Her son, Facundo, and then more recently, her husband Marcelo, were also charged. All were acquitted. Last year a new suspect was named, but the statute of limitations means it is unclear how the situation will play out.
Marcelo Macarrón at a press conference after the murder of his wife
Netflix
The case is still, therefore, unsolved. In the absence of a culprit, rumor, speculation and conjecture took hold amid a press feeding frenzy.
“What unfolded was this remarkable kind of horrific rollercoaster over the years, of accusations, trials, wild conspiracies and the sort of appalling rumor mill that destroyed this family and just blew them apart,” Crawford says. “Their only defense against this media onslaught was to pull down the shutters and not talk, because anything you say will be taken as evidence against you. If you are crying, if you are not crying, if you are smiling, if you are not smiling… everything is a judgment. In the absence of them talking much over the years, a lot of assumptions were made about who they are. I was on a mission to go behind the headlines.”
In the wake of a press conference after the murder, Macarrón, was seen to be cold, while Facundo, who was in the closet, was outed in the press. The relentless media scrutiny is detailed in the film, and explains its title. In the final instalment, Macarrón says the media intrusion delayed him grieving for his dead wife. “They killed her 1,000 times with a 1,000 different tales,” he says.
Meanwhile, a local journalist who has followed the case from the start, Hernán Vaca Narvaja, contributes to the series and gives the perspective of the reporters tasked with covering the story.
Dalmasso’s Family On Camera
The team had two days apiece with the trio of family members. Valentina did not initially want to take part, but had a change of heart shortly before filming.
During the early stages of the interviews the subjects were closed, Crawford recalls, because that was how the family had learnt to deal with questions. They gradually opened up. “You have to keep knocking, to get through, and then everything comes out. Then you can really empathize and get an understanding of what it is actually like to go through this,” he says.
A low point in the media reporting of the murder was the broadcasting of pictures from the crime scene and Dalmasso’s body. Crawford says The Many Deaths of Nora Dalmasso team deliberately avoided replicating that kind of coverage: “We weren’t going to repeat that offense by showing the photos of her.”
Netflix had been pitched – and passed – on various takes on the Dalmasso story before greenlighting this project, which is made by Pulse Films, the producer behind The Disappearance of Madeleine McCann, also for Netflix.
“They had never found a route into it that they were happy was going to be sensitive enough,” Crawford says. “When I approach them with access to the family, that changed the game, because it’s a perspective we’ve not heard before, and it’s first-hand.”
The Pulse Films team included Tom Keeling, as the Executive Producer and CAA-repped Crawford says he was a key editorial guide and sounding board as the team developed a relationship with the family.
Jamie Crawford during the making of The Many Deaths Of Nora Dalmasso
Pulse Films
A New Lens On True Crime
The three-parter is now streaming on Netflix. “The facts of the case and the chronology of the events provide the framework for us, but not the narrative,” Crawford says. “We wanted to chart this experiential version of this story through the family, through the friends, through the journalists who lived this.”
He adds: “Her children, as part of this project, are really on a mission to introduce Nora Dalmasso to the world as she was, as their mum.”
An Argentine story, the Dalmasso case has parallels with other murders that grabbed local, then national, and then international attention.
“This crime very quickly exploded into a multimedia firestorm, in a similar fashion to the Madeleine McCann case or Amanda Knox, and became an iconic crime story of the last 20 years, replete with all of the ingredients that come together to make these things so combustible: sex, politics, money, mystery, murder.”
He adds: “It’s a well-known triangle between justice victims and press, and that’s the world that we interrogate, and it’s applicable to many of the stories that have cropped up here in the UK over the years or in the States.
“I hope [the series] will produce a degree of empathy where sometimes there was none. A lot of prejudicial assumptions were made and I think that there’s an opportunity to reassess how this story was told.”
As a filmmaker, Crawford says that making The Many Deaths Of Nora Dalmasso made him reflect upon the true crime genre. “It’s made me stop and think a little bit more about how we consume true crime and reflect that, when there is this kind of onslaught of information, it’s easy to forget that there are humans behind every story.”
