It is true that documentary filmmaking can play an important role in understanding the world around us. This happens when documentary work, distancing itself from the forms of sensationalism that proliferate in the media space, especially on television, has the basic intelligence to deal with a complex issue, whatever it may be, without hiding, precisely, its complexity. Example to discover, now available on Netflix: Matter of Timemade by Matt Finlin, with Eddie Vedder as a prominent figure.
Ultimately, saying that Vedder is “highlighted” is a language that needs to be put into perspective. The lead singer of Pearl Jam, also with an important solo career (his most recent album, Earthlingwas released in 2022), appears, in fact, as the protagonist of a concert, but this is not a “concert film”. Yours performance at Benaroya Hall, in Seattle, took place in 2023 with a very precise purpose: to open the range of information about a rare disease – epidermolysis bullosa (EB) – and mobilize support for the scientific projects that are being developed to find a cure.
And because we are talking about cinema here, it is important to highlight the fact that the various sequences with these people (some of them also present at the concert) are filmed with unusual purity: on the one hand, it is about preserving a frontal realism, in every sense of the word, capable of accounting for the drama that treatments can involve and the suffering inherent to the patients’ situation; on the other hand, all of this comes to us through a method of elaborate modesty, preserving the human dimension of everything we see happening.
A matter of time
We are facing a fight in which family stories and scientific research come together, all finding a very special echo in Vedder’s songs. Through the testimonies of those who study EB, we learn that, in addition to there already being medications with some palliative effect, the scientific community believes that within a decade it will be possible to find a cure. At the same time, the words of family members, and the patients themselves, reflect the rawest facts, along with the most delicate emotions, of stories of admirable resilience.
It’s a matter of time, as Eddie Vedder says in the film’s title song – the The respective music video is available on YouTube, in fact in an animation that echoes some sequences from the film in which the cartoons serve to “figure out” the way in which EB attacks cells. It’s not every day that we come across a documentary so simple, and also so true, about such special experiences.
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