Director: Louise van Assche, Kwinten Gernay
A camera turned toward grief becomes an act of reckoning in The Bad Guy, a 2024 documentary that opens on the first anniversary of the Uvalde school shooting.
What is The Bad Guy about?
Belgian director Louise van Assche lives close enough to Uvalde, Texas, that the tragedy reaches her doorstep just as she becomes a new mother. As the town marks one year since the shooting, national arguments over gun control and school safety flare up again, and van Assche finds herself pulled into the community's grief rather than observing it from a distance. Working with co-director Kwinten Gernay, she builds a short, unflinching portrait of a place still absorbing loss while the country argues about what should change. At 69 minutes, the film moves quickly between intimate household moments and the wider public debate, letting the two register against each other without forcing a conclusion.
Cast & crew
The documentary's credited voices include Michael Godere, Ezekiel Ajeigbe, Raul Ceballos, Chris Diamantopoulos, Mallory Low, and Zehra Fazal, framed alongside van Assche and Gernay's own directorial perspective rather than a traditional scripted cast.
Context & significance
Made in the United States by a Belgian filmmaking team, The Bad Guy sits in K-Time's documentary catalog as a compact, first-person entry point into an ongoing American debate, told from the vantage of someone who moved into the story rather than assigned to cover it.
Where & how to watch
The Bad Guy streams on K-Time with a Farsi-dubbed audio track, and reading this page never requires an account — only pressing play does. K-Time's interface is built around Farsi menus and search, so Persian-speaking viewers can browse and watch this documentary the same way they would any title in the catalog, with a free login standing between this page and the film itself.