ABOUT THE PROJECT

LOGLINE
Children in South Texas, who bear an outsized burden of loss, learn language for what feels impossible — and discover, alongside their community, the power of mutual understanding and shared intention.

SYNOPSIS
The Texas Hill Country has absorbed tragedy upon tragedy: in May 2022, the mass shooting at Robb Elementary in Uvalde killed 19 children and 2 teachers, and in July 2025, the flooding of the Guadalupe River in Kerrville took at least 139 lives, including 25 campers and 2 counselors at Camp Mystic. Eighty-four percent of the population is low-income and minority, compounding the loss.

A Garden for What Remains follows a diverse group of children who have already walked through the hardest part: they’ve completed evidence-based cognitive behavioral therapy at The Children’s Bereavement Center of South Texas (TCBCST), which served 1,577 children and 1,044 adults in 2025. With them, we reenact the curriculum as they lived it, grief given shape and survived. This lets us see how the work actually heals: how a child learns to name a feeling instead of being ruled by it, how listening becomes a skill, how a room of strangers becomes a place to be known.

Alongside them, caregivers, community members, and faith leaders shepherd recovery. Father Bert Baetz, a Kerrville pastor who awaited news of his daughter when the flood hit, is raising a new church incorporating driftwood and river rock, its murals living memorials to the lives lost. In Uvalde, families are making ceramic tiles for a meditation garden. These are stories of repair, the film’s beating heart, proof that what heals one child can heal a community.

Grief is a subject our culture pushes away. To function as a society, we must learn to live with it: to listen, to name feelings, to respond without reactivity. These skills can be taught. Receiving counseling changed the lens through which these children see their world. We intend for the film to change the lens through which the public sees grief and healing.

PROJECT TYPE Documentary Feature

DIRECTOR Kathryn Himoff
PRODUCER Kathryn Himoff, Elyse Katz

ID: 802