[NOTE: The Bad Guy available until August 18, 2025.]

Director’s Statement

By Louise Van Assche, Director

The primal instinct to protect my daughter lies at the heart of “The Bad Guy”. One typical hot Texas afternoon, I was sitting on the sofa, watching the news. My beautiful daughter Zaïra, barely two months old, was peacefully dozing off in my arms when news about an ongoing school shooting abruptly appeared. Nineteen kids and two teachers were gunned down in an elementary school in Uvalde, just a couple of towns away from us.

About three years before that, I had left my home in Belgium for Texas. This school shooting that was so close and killed so many was a wake-up call about what it means to be a parent in the United States. I became obsessed with school safety and started researching. I not only learned that guns are now the leading cause of death among American youth, but bumped into phenomena such as active shooter drills and to a more extreme level: arming teachers.

During the making of the film, it became clear how much fear parents, and even more so kids, have to endure on a daily basis. My heart broke when I heard Berkley (14), one of the subjects in the film, conclude: “You would think school is a place to learn. But right now, it feels like it could be a place to die. Schools shouldn’t be like this.”

When I became a parent in the U.S., I became part of a system in which l have to participate, whether I like it or not. It’s a system that seems to be driven more by fear than reason, and highly reactive instead of preventive. A system in which some of the responsibility to protect children is placed on the children themselves.