the story around Warren Jeffs\u2019s crimes<\/a>.<\/p>\nTrust Me is a sequel of sorts, or rather another chapter, as Dretzin prefers to call it. But this time she\u2019s not just working with archival footage, witness testimony and after-the-fact talking head interviews. She\u2019s got Marie and Katas\u2019s on-the-ground, eye-opening footage of an unsuspecting Bateman, who often comes off as a bumbling and pathetically narcissistic figure. He preens for the camera, eagerly poses on his motorcycle and hatches preposterous schemes; like luring the Queen of England into being one of his wives with a music video that he convinces Marie and Katas to direct.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne of the things that I relished the most was the comic relief of this guy,\u201d says Dretzin, not discounting how harmful Bateman was. \u201cIt\u2019s hard to believe somebody who\u2019s such a terrible perpetrator of such terrible crimes is also this absurd character. But of course, he\u2019s not the only one out there who embodies that tension.\u201d<\/p>\n
The footage doesn\u2019t just feature Bateman, but also the young manipulated \u201cwives\u201d who he commands, who Marie and Katas befriended. According to Dretzin, the duo trusted her with the material because of her familiarity with FLDS culture after making Keep Sweet, and her sensitivity towards victims who naively defend the very culture and culprits that prey on them.<\/p>\n
Marie and Katas couldn\u2019t make the documentary themselves, of course, because the FBI informants were too central to the story. So instead, they lead what is ostensibly a documentary within a documentary, a probing setup that has us not just witnessing crimes, but also how the crimes are witnessed.<\/p>\n
Trust Me is constantly taking us behind the scenes as Marie and Katas plot and stage their shoots and interviews with Bateman and the girls, under-the-guise of making a documentary that will flatter the FLDS cause. There\u2019s a meta-quality to these moments, folding the whole documentary apparatus into its narrative, and provoking questions about the form and the ethics around it.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis series is about betrayal and trust, which are in many ways at the heart of documentary film-making,\u201d says Dretzin. \u201cSometimes you build trust with people who ultimately don\u2019t control the story you\u2019re going to tell.<\/p>\n
Christine Marie in Trust Me: The False Prophet. Photograph: COURTESY OF NETFLIX<\/p>\n
\u201cChristine is in many ways a proxy for the audience \u2013 as she learns about the story, we\u2019re learning about the story \u2013 but also for me as a film-maker. This film within a film, this question about witnessing, the ethics of witnessing, all of it was very alive.<\/p>\n
\u201cI understand a lot of what Christine was going through when she says: \u2018I have to betray them to save them. I have to play this dual role. I have to sit here and pretend that I agree with everything [Bateman\u2019s] doing in order to ultimately bring this case to justice\u2019 \u2026 As a documentary film-maker these are issues that I wrestle with personally all the time.\u201d<\/p>\n
Marie is a colourful personality, a former Ms Michigan, escape artist and ventriloquist. You might initially suspect her of being a bit self-aggrandizing, perhaps only because that\u2019s what documentary makers who insert themselves into their own films tend to be. But Marie\u2019s conviction slowly reveals itself, as does her past life as a Mormon, which weighs heavily on her refusal, as Dretzin puts it, to look away as young women are exploited.<\/p>\n
There are other compelling voices slowly emerging throughout Trust Me, like Julia, a mother who catches on to Marie\u2019s ruse and becomes a pivotal and heartbreaking witness at risk of losing access to her own daughters. And then there\u2019s Naomi, a young woman who at one point the authorities dub the ringleader among Bateman\u2019s \u201cwives\u201d.<\/p>\n
Naomi, or Nomz as she\u2019s called, is the one who will catch your eye in every scene, because hers are ever watchful and calculating, the furthest from naive. According to her aunt Carole, who defected from FLDS, it took years of aggressive manipulation, by the men Naomi trusted as a child, to finally break down any resistance to marrying Bateman and command her unwavering commitment to this predatory belief system that defines her life. In the end, it\u2019s Naomi who is an even more captivating and unnerving presence than Bateman himself.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe groomed our girls for this,\u201d Carole says, in the series, her words landing like a gut punch while resonating far beyond the extreme circumstances within the FLDS. \u201cWe\u2019re not teaching them to question authority. We\u2019re not teaching them to be critical thinkers. We\u2019re teaching \u2018em strict obedience.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThis story, on many levels, has echoes in our ordinary lives and our political lives,\u201d says Dretzin. \u201cThe idea that when an authority figure tells you something, it has an inherent rightness to it, it\u2019s prevalent everywhere.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is the era of Trump. This is the era of a lot of realities that are closed systems in which you\u2019re in an echo chamber, so truth becomes a very subjective thing,\u201d says Dretzin. \u201cLooking at these cultic systems, in which there\u2019s a very closed system, no access to outside information, you\u2019re just reinforcing each other, it\u2019s touching something in us, culturally. We may not even be aware of why it speaks to us, but it speaks to us for a reason.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Film-making affects change. Director Rachel Dretzin, a former investigative journalist for Frontline, will testify to that. \u201cThese films…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":519887,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[96,2839,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-519886","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/519886","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=519886"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/519886\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/519887"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=519886"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=519886"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=519886"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}