Tribeca 2022: Leave No Trace Review

This will be one of several reviews from this year’s Tribeca film Festival. To follow our coverage, click here.

There’s another Leave No Trace in town. Not to be confused with the 2018 Debra Granik drama film starring Ben Foster and Thomasin McKenzie, this Leave No Trace is much different. This chilling documentary exposes the Boy Scouts of America and their part in the sexual abuse of boys over the course of most of their existence. While the film is often not easy to watch, featuring interviews with past victims both young and old and their traumatized families who are still haunted by their pasts, it is nonetheless an important one if only to shine a light on how the organization has shockingly gotten away with this for as long as it has and may still be. It is difficult to know for sure considering the surprisingly secretive organization. Either way, audiences should get ready to feel a lot of things over the course of its near 2 hour running time and most of them will not be good.

Leave No Trace, may be a hint about the secrecy of the Boy Scouts but it is also their respect of nature and leaving no trace following their countless outdoor outings. The film chronicles the advent of the Boy Scouts and how they evolved over the years through the lens of the evolution of America as the two were often hand in hand. However, sexual abuse was happening from the start of their founding and continued unimpeded despite the fact that the Boy Scouts knew about it thought did nothing. Based on this, one can’t help but think that they were protecting their own reputations over protecting their own scouts. Being mostly children at the time, they were perhaps not the best equipped to deal with their abuse in the moment but the full extent of that damage could be felt upon reaching their adult years with some dealing with that trauma better than others. Watching the victims talk about their experiences was simply heartbreaking while seeing some recover from their ordeals and make lives for themselves was uplifting.

At the end of the day, victims have slowly but surely getting some justice with the Boy Scouts Of America reaching a $2.7 billion agreement over sex abuse claims, the largest such settlement in history. That being said, there is still plenty of work to do. However, film such as Leave No Trace help in exposing wrongdoers and providing some sense of justice.

still courtesy of Tribeca

If you liked this, please read our other reviews here and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter or Instagram or like us on Facebook.

Keith Noakes

The EIC of the coincidentally-named keithlovesmovies.com. A Canadian who prefers to get out of the cold and into the warmth of a movie theatre.