Fest Track On Sirk TV Film Review: A MATTER OF TRUST [Tribeca Film Festival 2022 - Virtual]

The progression of stories are based in a context of how people act and what they see of their lives. With the different interweaving aspects of "A Matter Of Trust" [International Narrative Competition], the idea is whether the motivations of other human beings and interactions with them have any altruism or simply agenda to them. An interesting takeaway is the aspect that it can be both. What is said can be different than the actions otherwise undertaken or even perhaps, the words or actions themselves can be misinterpreted to a point. Even though the stories eventually seem to be non-connected, it actually is initially possible that they might be connected but the time element could be different. That would have made this completely a different picture because then it would be a story about different stages in life. Alas this is not the case and the stories are simply meant to show parallels of a larger metaphor. The story begins with a doctor helping the authorities who are repatriating an Afghan man back to his country. She believes there is an altruistic reason to his return but reality seeps in even though her colleague tells her otherwise.

In another, a man goes with his young pregnant wife to the funeral of one of his former friends, a lady...and yet there is part of the past he isn't telling her. She cannot reconcile it and he doesn't explain in the moment. In another, a teenager goes to school and the idea of where he wants his life to go takes a different path which is both his doing and not. The last two stories would seem to have been interconnected (though in different times) which would have given them much more poignancy since it gives motivation or background to the ensuing years. Another story is a man and a woman that get away for a weekend tryst yet the reasoning is not what one would think. Another story with a mother and her daughter who went through a trauma examines another aspect but again, if it was connected to the doctor and/or the tryst in a different time period, it would have been much more poignant. As is, the context of the film is interesting but not groundbreaking because there was so much more here if the dots were all connected. That is not the fault of the filmmaker. She was connecting them thematically without giving two many repercussive details but actual narrative connectivity, even inferred in names, would have elevated the story in a much different, almost existential way. B-

By Tim Wassberg