Grit Diaries
Blue and Jason Gerber · 37 min
When award-winning filmmakers stumbled into a luxury handbag designer's studio, they discovered a decade-long story of grief, art, and radical forgiveness that took nine years to bring to screen.
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Blue and Jason Gerber walked into a studio looking for a five-minute commercial about a maker. What they found instead was a decade-long story about grief, art, and what happens after tragedy.
They met Shelley, a luxury handbag designer in Chicago whose sister was murdered by an intimate partner. When they asked how she got started, she told them about her sister's death and her work with a domestic violence shelter. Within a month of filming, Blue and Jason knew this was a feature film. What drew them was not the crime or the court case, but the harder, less-told part: how someone heals and persists when they are left behind. How they rebuild. How they grieve.
Over nearly four years of production and another four in post-production, Blue and Jason witnessed Shelley transform her pain into her craft. They followed her to Italy to study handbag design. They asked her deeper questions about her collection, Dawn Dusk, and discovered she had been watching sunrise and sunset every day after the murder because they were the only consistent things in her fractured world. The filmmakers chose to edit the story thematically rather than linearly, with Shelley's hairstyles shifting between scenes, because that is how grief actually works: in twists and turns, not in a straight line.
One moment changed everything for Blue and Jason. They witnessed Shelley choose to pray forgiveness over the man who killed her sister. Not to say what he did was okay, but to free herself from the weight of carrying bitterness. That choice gave them words for their own experiences of forgiveness and the lightness that comes from letting go. The film is a story about how breaking can make you stronger, and how the cracks in your life, when held with care, can become the most beautiful part of who you are.
⚠️ Content advisory: this episode discusses domestic & family violence and grief & loss, which some listeners may find distressing.
If you need support, you're not alone. Help is available: • 1800RESPECT (family, domestic & sexual violence): 1800 737 732 · 1800respect.org.au • Lifeline (24/7 crisis support): 13 11 14 · lifeline.org.au • GriefLine: 1300 845 745 · griefline.org.au
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