Two Daughters (BBC Two) is a raw and devastating film about grief, and an astonishing testament to resilience and the power of faith. The presenter, Stacey Dooley, has spent close to a year with Mina and Chris Smallman. Mina’s daughter Bibaa Henry and Mina and Chris’s daughter, Nicole Smallman, were murdered in a north London park in June 2020, as Bibaa celebrated her birthday. Like so many crimes perpetrated by violent men, it was, says Dooley, a horrific case of wrong time, wrong place for the women. But, she goes on to say, with barely concealed rage, what happened afterwards had nothing to do with bad luck.
Mina is an astonishing woman. Dooley first visits her and Chris at home in Ramsgate on what would have been Bibaa’s 47th birthday, a year after the murders. She brings them flowers. Dooley feels less like a presenter and more like a family friend. When she talks to Mina and Chris, we are bearing witness to deeply personal conversations. In other scenarios, her conversational, casual approach can have its weaknesses, but in this one, it is all strength. She is very good at getting in a moment to the heart of what matters, and her empathy enables people to trust her with the unvarnished truth.
Part of this film tells the story of what happened to Bibaa and Nicole, and part tells the story of a horror compounded by the Metropolitan police’s failings, and later the crimes of two of its officers. The scale of the lives devastated by what happened is made plain. Grief reverberates through those who knew Bibaa and Nicole. Some are able to share their memories, others are too traumatised to speak on camera. We see family photographs and films of the women, who were 20 years apart in age but very close. You sense that the purpose is to humanise them, in light of what happened next, to make sure that the public sees them as the women they were while they lived: Bibaa a social worker working with children, about to become a grandmother; Nicole a photographer and singer, a hippy and a lover of animals.
Mina’s courage is a marvel. Dooley follows her and Chris through two trials – the murder trial, and the trial of the two police officers, Deniz Jaffer and Jamie Lewis, convicted of misconduct in public office for sharing photographs they took of the dead women’s bodies – and through the wait for an Independent Office for Police Conduct report on the Met’s mishandling of the case. Dooley is steady as she hears how, after the women were reported missing, the police failed to go to the park where they were last seen, leaving the family to organise a search and Nicole’s boyfriend, Adam Stone, to discover their bodies. The sisters’ aunt sobs as she recalls a police officer at the park who would not allow family members to see the bodies, but who promised to look after the sisters and take care of them.
Mina says that without her faith – she is a priest – she would be “angry, bitter and twisted”. As a viewer, it is hard to not feel angry. Chris does not share Mina’s religious convictions, and Dooley’s interviews with him are remarkable, as they share frank conversations about a father’s grief, how he copes and when he doesn’t. Mina draws on her beliefs and turns to activism. At a vigil at the park where the women were killed, she asks: “Why wasn’t the outcry there [for] two dead black girls?” The many questions left unanswered are awful: why didn’t the police go to the park? Why wasn’t this story on every front page? Why did two police officers lack so much humanity they felt entitled to take photographs with the bodies and distribute them to two different WhatsApp groups? A small, powerful detail is that Bibaa was following Covid rules by having her party in the park, rather than breaking them and inviting friends to celebrate with her indoors.
Two Daughters is not an easy programme to watch. It shouldn’t be. But as Mina says, it is important for people to see all aspects of this story. “This is what a mother’s grief looks like,” she says. I am not sure I have ever seen such a frank and honest portrayal as this. It is a clear-eyed portrait of loss that tells the world who Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman were. Presumably the film was finished before Mina and Chris had to go to court again, in May, as Jaffer and Lewis appealed against their sentences. They were unsuccessful.
